BT launches CRM advisory service

LONDON – British Telecommunications (BT) launched an advisory service Friday that aims to help companies make decisions about CRM (customer relationship management) software purchasing.

The InsightExec service is both online and offline, with an online forum where users can get advice plus regular events where people can get together. It aims to give potential buyers advice from suppliers, consultants and their peers, Pierre Danon, CEO of BT Retail said.

Having run a version of InsightExec as a marketing service for customers for several years, BT decided it could be a viable business on its own, Danon said. To do so it has bought an existing CRM network Web site, CRM-Forum (http://www.crm-forum.com), which has 83,000 regular members and 10,000 visitors a week. CRM-Forum was previously run by SIFT Group Ltd. of Bristol, England. The CRM-Forum name will continue to be used initially because it is well recognized, he said.

InsightExec users can post a query for free on a message board, or pay for an e-mailed response to a question or for an in-depth discussion with an expert. Seven BT staff are on hand to receive requests from users and route them to the most suitable partner and make sure they get the help they need, InsightExec CEO Tony Rice said.

The majority of users at the moment are smaller businesses, Danon said, but the company hopes to boost the number of enterprise clients. Those are likely to join on a subscription basis.

To date, 60 partners have signed up to the service and Rice hopes to boost that number to 250 by the end of 2003.

This model is likely to change if the service grows substantially to make sure users get the best advice, Ronan acknowledged, as partners will all be keen to gain access to the most interesting users.

Jeremy Anderson is CEO of Atos KPMG Consulting, one of the first partners to sign up to the forum. The benefits of partnership are twofold, he said, in that it helps U.K. business, and will also boost Atos’ own business.

“In an environment with rapid change, it’s hard for business leaders to know what matters and they need authoritative, independent advice,” Anderson said. CRM is a particularly difficult area for companies to get information on, he said.

This sort of communication “doesn’t fit our business model at all, because we usually focus on our top 50 clients. But this lets us make our expertise available more widely, and may bring us some future clients, too,” he said.

If the CRM forum is a success, BT will consider taking the model into other areas, Danon said.