The CRM Mashup

From small to large, from the enterprise to the mid-size organization, from on-demand to on premises with consolidations aplenty, there's a sea change going on in CRM.

Enterprise mashups aim to bring business intelligence to desktops, with automated tools collecting and integrating selected Web data into a spreadsheet. Business Mashups LLC is conducting a "social CRM" experiment called Social Sales which reduces the need to leave a CRM app to gather information.

If mashups sound like the kind of Web 2.0 application best used for checking traffic jams on Google Maps, think again: Mashups within the enterprise environment are becoming common for functions such as integrating social-networking information into CRM Relevant Products/Services tools. And as they get easier to make, they'll continue to grow in popularity and usefulness.

Business Mashups LLC, which creates mashup environments for businesses, has taken some steps forward in bringing mature mashups into the corporation. In the coming week(s) we will release several mashup products that aim to bring business intelligence to desktops with little human intervention.

CRM Mashups

Customer-service management tools are also benefiting from mashups. Business Mashups LLC will provides open-source tools for rapid Web application development, in a "social CRM" experiment called Social Sales.

Today's CRM application users are tapping half a dozen other Web resources to populate their databases and get their jobs done. For example, when salespeople review trade-show leads, they may come across a familiar name. If more information about that person is not already in the CRM system, then someone needs to start researching on social-networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to find out more about that person, which provides greater social context about the sales lead.

Social Sales will drastically reduces the need to leave a CRM application to gather the required information. Thanks to rapidly deployed Ajax applications and mashup robots, companies can create powerful social CRM applications in a day or two.

News: India Inc. taps Gay Market

There is some good news for the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Transgenders) community in India. Signaling a major shift in its once unyielding stand, the government of India has for the first time indicated it's willingness to review the 150 year old law that makes homosexuality a criminal offense.

And corporate India is boldly tapping into the hitherto 'under the carpet' gay clientele. India's first LGBT Pride Store, fittingly called Azad Bazaar (www.azadbazaar.com), is set to launch online operations in a fortnight.

Two women entrepreneurs from Mumbai co-founded the store after encouraging response to exhibitions held at parties in Mumbai and Delhi.

The store's philosophy is to "create ways that members of the LGBT community and its supporters can make statements of freedom and pride while still having fun with naughty one-liners" explain the gutsy entrepreneurs.

50 per cent of their customers are straight and none of the products offend Indian sensibilities. The products range from slogan T shirts, mugs, key chains and earrings to butch biker wristbands, leather cushions and shot glasses.

What ails e-commerce in India

The slow growth of e-commerce in India stands in contrast to the booming market for mobile connectivity. Internet and broadband penetration is growing, yet the explosive growth that is possible in this vast country of 1 billion people remains elusive.

A report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI) estimated the size of the business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce industry in 2007 at 92,100 million rupees (US$2.10 billion), up around 30% from 70,800 million rupees (US$1.62 billion) the previous year. The figures include some consumer-to-consumer (C2C) categories such as online auctions and classifieds.

But India lags a long way behind other countries in the Asia-Pacific region when it comes to e-commerce transactions.

In many ways, India should have been an ideal market for e-commerce. The country is vast, and getting timely supplies to tens of thousands of retail outlets spread across the hinterland is never an easy task. The movement of goods through several layers adds to costs and can easily be disrupted by weather or the poor infrastructure across the nation.

Yet retail trade is booming in towns and cities, and malls are the flavour of the season. Indeed, most of the country’s leading business groups, including Reliance Industries, the Tata group and the Aditya Birla group, are all investing in huge brick and mortar retail businesses.

The online retail market has received comparatively less attention. “Online sales are a small fraction of retail sales in India…less than 1%,” says Dr. Subho Ray, president of IMAI.

Conventional reasoning cites poor penetration of broadband, the building block of e-commerce, as a key reason for poor online sales. India has just 4.57 million broadband subscribers, up from 2.47 million a year ago, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The growth in these numbers is nowhere near the boom seen in mobile telephony, which boasts almost 300 million subscribers, up from under 200 million a year ago.

Dr. Ray reasons that broadband penetration is not picking up because the supply side has not yet seen value in selling online in India.

“Because there is very little e-commerce happening, penetration isn’t increasing fast enough,” he says. Most of the bigger retail brands do not sell directly and prefer to sell through dealers and retail stores, he adds.

India has not had a tradition of mail order selling, and so the entire business of selling to end consumers is built around a system of dealers, sub dealers and traders that distribute products to the remotest stores with marginal cost additions. Traders form a powerful and highly competitive group, and have virtually taken over the distribution system. On the one hand they have rid manufacturers of the trouble of getting products to market on time, but on the other they have made manufacturers highly dependent on the trader community to reach out to the corner shop.

Dr. Ray sees this as one reason why sellers are not pushing online. “One part of the story is that you do not wish to antagonise your dealers and so prices are often not indicated online. This has to do with the way retail marketing is organised in India. The other side is our complicated array of taxes, like local sales tax vary from state to state, and even city to city,” he says.

Traders would sometimes circumvent these with local contacts and intelligence: for example, sometimes billing some goods with an address on the outskirts of, say, Mumbai to save local area taxes, and hand delivering the products from Thane city next door.

But perhaps the most critical barrier to e-commerce is the lack of credibility and confidence in the process of buying online. This is made worse by reports of just how poor service can be. And since there is no provision for escrow intermediaries under Indian law, there is little that consumers can do to redress a grievance. Complaints like late delivery, delivery of wrong products and outright misrepresentation are far too frequent to be ignored by prospective buyers.

Another major hurdle is logistics. “We do not have any integrated logistics system for seamless movement of goods. This is as much true for offline sales as it is for online,” Mokshagundam says.

In addition, consumers are often unsure of product quality, timely delivery, and worried about online security when paying by credit card. A report published earlier this year by eMarketer, which researches e-business and emerging technologies, says India’s “online payment system lacks credibility”. Worse, there appears to be no immediate perceived benefit in buying online, because prices can often be higher than in physical stores where discounts can be had through dealers.

A litany of bad experiences has been recorded by the Consumer Online Resource & Empowerment (CORE) centre, which runs with the support of India’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs to help consumers resolve complaints of deficient goods and services.

“There are many cases where the order is booked, the money withdrawn out of the bank and the goods have not reached the consumer,” says an official at CORE near New Delhi. “Some of the online businesses run customer care services that can keep you on hold for more than 30 minutes at a time.”

However, rising incomes and busy schedules mean India still is a fertile ground for growth. Indian online research firm JuxtConsult says 80% of all Indians with online services now “shop” online: they either window shop or actually buy online. It says 23% bought products in the past six months, and of these 92% have bought a travel product online.

Wireless broadband could also boost uptake. WiMAX proponent Intel in August announced support for the “Connected Indians” programme by government and industry in India to facilitate the provision of Internet access. Intel also signed an MOU with India’s largest telco BSNL to help deliver WiMAX solutions across India.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) and several other travel portals are among those now offering solutions on mobiles, reasoning that wider penetration of mobile services could lead to more deals happening through handheld devices. But mobile-based e-commerce is yet to catch on in a big way. Only a very small number of railway tickets, for example, are booked through mobiles says IRCTC.

Business-to-business e-commerce services have also been slow to take off. “The B2B e-commerce sector, even more reliant on seller volume than the B2C market, has been slow to gain followers in the Indian market,” say Datamonitor analysts in a recent research note. “However, with India pushing to become a major manufacturing outsourcing destination, the B2B e-commerce market is experiencing an upswing thanks to sunrise sectors such as pharmaceutical manufacturing, construction and equipment manufacturing. Lack of market leaders both in the B2B exchange and escrow space, however, may dampen prospective growth.”

On track: e-commerce progress in India

The bulk of B2C e-commerce business in India comes from the travel segment, pushed by the emergence of low cost carriers. The runaway success story comes from an unlikely player, part of a government-owned giant that moves the Indian economy on its tracks: the Indian Railways that runs the second largest railway network in the world and is spread over 108,700 track kilometres. Its subsidiary, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), stands out as one shining example of just how much e-commerce can achieve in India.

The IRCTC ticket booking site records more than 100,000 transactions a day. It issued 3.3 million tickets in the holiday season in July this year; and it reported turnover of 17,000 million rupees (E269 million) in its last fiscal year and is on track to double that this year. “It is all about providing value,” says IRCTC’s general manager, operations, Sanjay Aggarwal. “There are many disadvantages for a consumer booking online: we ask him to spend to use the Internet, the transaction can be interrupted because of power or connectivity failure and there could be disturbance in delivery of the ticket. So the value we provide should be greater than the inconvenience of all this.”

Long queues are common at ticket counters in India, and it is not possible to check as many options as it is when you are surfing the IRCTC site, says Aggarwal. In addition, IRCTC has appointed some 30,000 agents to enable those without Internet access to book tickets.

Aggarwal says the average transaction size is less than 800 rupees, and over 70% of its customers book non air-conditioned class of travel. In addition, IRCTC’s payment reversal system means a wait listed ticket—issued if another customer cancels—that is not confirmed by the date of the journey is automatically refunded in full.

Successful Internet Business Models for SMBs

Technology has played an imperative role in business operations. The advent of internet has given a new methodology to conduct business faster in a cost effective way in a limited time and space. The economic downturn has increased the reliance on IT, and various companies are showing retroflexion.

Since our company, Business Mashups LLc, does web development work for Internet companies and web entrepreneurs, we have gained experience in understanding both the technological and business side of a web site. We believe the economic climate is favorable to companies like ours as we would be able to help most SMBs cut their costs, and become more efficient and help them in focusing on core revenue-generating aspects of their business. We have adopted a very aggressive approach to reach out to SMBs, and help educate them on the buying decision. We have also put a more concerted effort on simple tools that help businesses understand the savings associated with our model, and the associated tactical benefits that help them manage through the uncertainty using our scalable IT platform.

With the increasing capital constraints, most businesses are finding it hard to fund large up-front technology purchases and opt for a recurring cost model instead. The increasing regulation and compliance needs have actively propelled most businesses to make very conscious decisions about their infrastructure, and the outsourced model stands out to its advantages around cost savings, minimal capital expenditure, and flexible IT infrastructure.

How can you rate a successful e-business?

The outward signs of a robust and thriving business are:

1. Revenue increases
   
   
2. Ability to generate profits
   
   
3. Success in creating meaningful alliances
   
   
4. Success in expanding into new markets
   
   
5. Differentiating itself

Existing business models are of many kinds:

• Advertising - banner and direct marketing
  
  
• Subscription sites
  
  
• Customer services
  
  
• Directory services
  
  
• Content providers
  
  
• Product/Service sales

Most successful companies pursue several related but different models concurrently. They defy easy categorization by diversifying revenue streams and becoming hybrids in a cost-efficient way.

ORACLE

This software and service provider entered the digitized world only in 1998, and metamorphosed into a digital pioneer in the span of two years. Innovative products and services and integration of these services have brought them into the forefront of web innovation today.

Products like Biz Online Initiative that deliver simple and complete online services and a host of other tools that customers require in setting up an e-business have made them a one stop shop for e-biz today. Their built-in self-service system for customers, employees and suppliers improved productivity and accuracy and brought down costs by 100's of millions of dollars. Consulting services with major firms like Sun Professional Systems have established their reliability with customers.

Their business formula:

1. Innovative products and packages
   
   
2. Integration of internal processes
   
   
3. Exemplary customer service - a user friendly web site that connects customers easily
   
   
4. Fast online e-business services
   
   
5. Expert consultancy services

Another company in this league is Exodus Communications, an Internet data center that offers a range of web hosting services, bandwidth on demand, security monitoring. Their servers host leading web sites like Yahoo!, e-Bay and Merril Lynch. They allow these firms to deliver content and applications online round the clock without fail.

35% of their revenue comes from a very successful e-business consulting firm whom they have partnered with (Sapient). They are expanding from 19 data centers to 34 data centers this year.

CISCO

Cisco develops switches and routers for Local Area Networks (LAN) and Wireless Area Networks (WAN) and the related software. They have become the worldwide leaders in networking for the Internet today.

90% of their sales are conducted over the Internet. They offer expertise in planning and executing Internet enabled solutions.

The company has grown in the past 7 years with 71 acquisitions to its credit, the latest being its investments in an optical equipment company and speech recognition software makers. Their business model could be termed an acquisition one!

Amazon

The customer is King here! Amazon pampers their customers, tracks their tastes and uses this information to create a unique customer experience. This e-tailer cultivates relationships that lead to customers liking and trusting them. This kind of service surpasses the most brilliant technology in use today. Amazon brought in the world of successful one-to-one marketing, a personal touch from another era.

Recently though, they have suffered heavy losses, proving that any successful e-business strategy will survive provided it is based on a solid brick and mortar foundation, a la Barnes and Noble, another famous online bookseller. Although barnesandnoble.com and Barnes the Noble Ltd. are run separately, a customer tends to associate trust and comfort in a known and established brand.

To summarize, exemplary customer service, successful online advertising and special discounted offers made Amazon and books synonymous terms today.

Building a Drag-and-Drop Shopping Cart with AJAX

The rise of AJAX over the past several months has taken over the development world and breathed new life into the Web. Although these techniques have been possible for many years now, the maturity of Web standards like XHTML and CSS now make it a viable alternative that will be viewable by all but the oldest browsers.

We're going to harness the power of the Scipt.aculo.us JavaScript library to provide our interaction. As their Web site states, this library "provides you with easy-to-use, compatible and, ultimately, totally cool JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly, Web 2.0 style." We're also going to utilize the library to handle the actual AJAX data piping to our application. Both of these libraries are free for all to use, and they're easier to integrate than you would think.

For this article, we'll create an interactive shopping experience allowing us to add items to our shopping basket by dragging and dropping them onto an icon of a shopping cart. We'll add AJAX functionality, allowing us to update our shopping cart without redrawing the entire screen. To save the trouble of setting up a product database, we'll use Amazon Web Services to search for DVDs and use those to shop from.

Start with a blank index.cfm in your root directory. You'll need to visit http://script.aculo.us/downloads to download the latest distribution (they're nearing a final release for version 1.5 as of this writing). Copy the "lib" and "src" directories into your empty directory. You'll need all of the .js files so just copy over the entire directory in each case. Next, type the following lines into the section of your page:

We'll need a search box to submit our query to Amazon:

<form action="index.cfm" method="post">
Search: <input type="text" name="keywords" size="20" />
<input type="submit" name="search" value="Go" />
</form>

The page will look for a form.search variable and run an Amazon search when it is defined. Each item returned will be placed in its own styled div that will be able to be picked up and dragged.

The Scriptaculous library makes it easy to create "draggables" (the only required argument is the ID of the object that you want draggable).

Listing 1 contatins the code to search Amazon and return the results as draggable divs.

Listing 1: Run Amazon search and return results:

<cfif isDefined("form.search")>
<!--- Submit REST query --->
<cfhttp url="http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=#REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_KEY#&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords=#form.keywords#
&SearchIndex=DVD&Sort=relevancerank&ResponseGroup=Small,ItemAttributes,Images,Offers"
throwOnError="yes" charset="UTF-8"></cfhttp>
<!--- parse XML document --->
<cfset myXMLdoc = XmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent)>
<CFSET xnSearch = myXMLdoc.xmlRoot>

<cfoutput>
<!--- if results LT 10, loop through those, otherwise show first 10 --->
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="#IIF(xnSearch.Items.TotalResults.XMLText gt
10,'10',xnSearch.Items.TotalResults.XMLText)#">

<!--- add cftry/cfcatch in case no image or other error // we'll use UPC as div id --->
<cfif xnSearch.Items.Item[i].Offers.TotalOffers.XmlText gt 0>
<div style="font-size:10px;font-family:Arial;text-align:center;
background-color:##eee;float:left;margin:10px; border:1px solid ##666; padding:5px;"
id="#xnSearch.Items.Item[i].ItemAttributes.UPC.XmlText#">
<img src="#xnSearch.Items.Item[i].MediumImage.URL.XmlText#"><br />
#xnSearch.Items.Item[i].ItemAttributes.Title.XmlText#

#xnSearch.Items.Item[i].ItemAttributes.UPC.XmlText#
#xnSearch.Items.Item[i].ItemAttributes.ListPrice.FormattedPrice.XmlText#
</div>

<!--- make this item draggable // reference by UPC as div id --->
<script type="text/javascript">
new Draggable('#xnSearch.Items.Item[i].ItemAttributes.UPC.XmlText#', {revert:true});
</script>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
</cfoutput>
<br clear="all" />
</cfif>
At this point, all of the items returned from the search will be in their own box and should be
draggable around the screen. When we created each draggable, we set "revert=true", which will snap
each object back to its original location if not placed directly on a drop zone.

Next, we'll add a graphic of a shopping cart to our page, which will become a drop target on which to drag items. The Scriptaculous library also makes it easy to create these "droppables". The syntax is simply:

Droppables.add('id_of_element',[options]);

The code below creates a droppable zone of id "cart1" and also runs a function onDrop() that pops up an alert box letting the user know an item has being added. We then hide the element from view, which allows the other divs to slide over and adjust accordingly.

<img src="shopcart.jpg" id="cart1" style="float:left;">
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
Droppables.add('cart1', { onDrop:function(element) {
alert('Added UPC ' + element.id + ' to your shopping cart.');
Element.hide(element.id);}})
</script>

The items should now be disappearing when dropped onto the shopping cart, but there's nothing going on behind the scenes yet. Now it's time to add some AJAX to process our shopping cart.

Although there are several AJAX libraries to choose from, we're going to use the ColdFusion Simple Remote Scripting library made available free of charge by Matthew Walker of ESWsoftware in New Zealand. uses an IFRAME for communication and encapsulates all of the dirty work for you. This library was chosen for its ability to handle HTML tables well and for its ability to interact directly with the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) to output our shopping cart rows.

We'll start with an empty cart by including the following code:

<fieldset style="width:400px;">
<legend>Your shopping cart</legend>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" id="tableCart">
<thead></thead><tbody></tbody></table>
<button onclick="emptyCartButton_onClick()" id="emptyCartButton">
Clear Shopping Cart</button>
</fieldset>

(Don't worry about the fact that our table body () is empty right now - we'll be populating it in just a second through AJAX.)

Next, you'll need to download the package from www.eswsoftware.com/products/download/. Copy the srs.cfm file into your Webroot (or you can add it to your CustomTags directory if you plan to do more AJAXing). You'll also need to create a subdirectory to hold the gateway pages that handle our AJAX data passing. Name the directory "SRS" and copy the Application.cfm and OnRequestEnd.cfm files into there from the "serverpages" directory in the zip file. You can use either regular CFM files or CFCs for these gateway pages (the download provides examples of each). The main thing to remember is that these pages should always return their results to "request.response".

Simply adding a call to your page will handle the creation of the hidden IFRAME for you. Another great feature of the CF_SRS library is the ability to view an inline debugging window right inside the page you are working on. This allows you to see all of the data being passed back and forth through the gateway. You can enable this debugging by calling the tag as . This line can be placed anywhere but we'll add it at the very end of the file.

Next, we'll need to create some JavaScript functions to handle the AJAX interactions. Add an onLoad function to your body tag as such: . This will execute body_onLoad() when the page loads and we'll use this function to set up our gateway. The function should read as follows:

function body_onLoad() {
// create an SRS gateway to the cart.cfm page
objGateway = new gateway("srs/cart.cfm?");
// update cart in case of return visit
// code for this function is below
updateCart();
}

Once you have created your gateway, you can invoke the methods below to send requests to the server:

• objGateway.setListener( str ): Use this method to specify the name of the function in your Web page that will handle the server's response. str is a string representing the function's name. The listener defaults to "alert", which will pop up a JavaScript alert() box containing the server's response. Note that while ColdFusion is a case-insensitive language, JavaScript is case-sensitive. If you return a structure to your listener function, all the structure keys will be rendered in JavaScript as lowercase.
  
  
• objGateway.setArguments( obj ): Set the arguments and values to pass to the server. obj is an object literal, which is basically just a set of one or more attribute/value pairs wrapped in curly braces. Here's an example: { name:'Joe', age:30, country:'US' }. You can see that string values need to be wrapped in quotation marks, and colons (:) are used in place of equals signs (=).
  
  
• objGateway.resetArguments(): Remove all the arguments previously set.
  
  
• objGateway.request(): Send the request to the server.

Note that you can chain these methods together. For example, it is perfectly acceptable to write:

objGateway.resetArguments().setArguments( { state:'NY' } ).request()

Using what we know now, let's take another look at our updateCart() function that we're calling onLoad.

function updateCart() { objGateway.setListener('cartPacket_onReceive').setArguments(
{action:'getCart'} ).request(); }

The function chains together several commands. It sets the listener to "cartPacket_onReceive". That means that we'll execute this JavaScript function whenever data is returned from our gateway. This function handles the generation of our table body that contains our cart rows (see Listing 2).

In our updateCart() function, we're also passing in an argument: action=getCart. This is going to be passed through to our cart.cfm gateway page. The full text of the gateway page is displayed in Listing 3.

We're passing in the action variable with a value of "getCart". This gets passed to our cart.cfm gateway page and causes the user's session cart to be returned as a query object. Whenever we need to update our cart to add or delete rows, we'll set our listener to 'cartPacket_onReceive' and then redraw the table body.

When we created our shopping cart on screen, we added the following button to clear our cart:

<button onclick="emptyCartButton_onClick()" id="emptyCartButton">
Clear Shopping Cart</button>

We'll add two JavaScript functions to go along with that button. The first will confirm the delete and the second will issue a call to remove the items and redraw the cart:

function emptyCartButton_onClick() {
if ( confirm('Are you sure you want to empty your cart?') ) clearCart();
}

function clearCart() {
objGateway.setListener('cartPacket_onReceive').setArguments( {action:'clearCart'}
).request();
}

Finally one more JavaScript function to be called when adding items to our cart:

function addToCart(upc) {
objGateway.setListener('cartPacket_onReceive').setArguments( {
action:'addToCart',upc:upc }
).request();
}

Now that we have our addToCart() function coded, add the line "addToCart(element.id);" right before the Element.hide call in the shopping cart droppable. This will execute our addToCart() function and redraw the shopping cart when an item is dropped onto it.

And that's all there is to it! With just 150 lines of code, we were able to create an interactive, drag-and-drop shopping experience that many did not think was possible using just the browser.