Chapter 16. Managing Your Service Vendors

In this chapter

Establishing Your Requirements

Finding the Best Products and Services

Communicatitng Your Requirements

Integrate Your Vendors

Tying It All Together

Partnership Model

Use Case Corner

Summary

Many of the services your customer relationship marketing initiative will need are available from various service vendors. For example, you can purchase services such as list management, direct mail, call-center support, mailing address cleanup, ISP and ASP providers, and customer or prospect database providers. Your task will be to figure out what you'll need, and then find the best source and set up a relationship with the selected vendor.

Cross-reference: See Chapter 19, “Accessing the CRM Online Community,” for a listing of Web sites that provide access to vendor information and assessments (see site category: Resources).

You will be responsible for knowing what you need and judging whether existing offerings will meet your requirements, matching up your requirements to one or more vendor services and orchestrating the implementation of selected products. That implementation will require planning, testing, and quality assurance for ongoing maintenance.

Most people think of software installation as a one-time event—load it once and you're done. As you move into business applications, it's better to think of software as an ongoing process of definition, development, and implementation. And usually that's not the end of it either. After software is implemented, you will still have ongoing maintenance in the form of corrections to the original or subsequent installs, changes to the requirements and installs, and new enhancements and features, delivered in new releases of software from your team or from your software vendor.