Operational CRM - This is the heart of what we have traditionally just called CRM. It represents those pieces of CRM that automate functions internal to the company, such as Sales, Marketing, or Customer Support functions. It's that part of CRM packages that interact with ERP packages to get product moving, facilitate the flow of internal information between individuals and teams, and automate or facilitate daily tasks.
Opt-In Marketing - This is a type of marketing where users give a company their permission, either directly or indirectly, to market to them. You often see requests for Opt-in marketing when filling out User Profiles on web sites. They often ask at the end if it would be OK for them to send your information to related and relevant parties who might have offers that would be interesting to you. By saying 'Yes,' you have "Opted-in" to marketing from those associated companies.
PBX - Private Branch Exchange, which is a private telephone network used within an enterprise. Users of PBXs share a certain number of outside lines for making telephone calls external to the PBX. In conjunction with PBX's, Automated Call Distribution (ACD) software is often employed in call centers to enhance the function of PBX's, by providing such capabilities as rules-based routing of calls, call queuing, and the like.
PDA - Personal Digital Assistant. The short-hand term for the handheld devices currently on the market, such as Palm-OS-based units, Pocket PC-based units, and units based on the Symbian OS from Psion (Symbian is due to make a bigger splash in the U.S. as the OS of choice on so-called "smart" phones - cell phones with PDA features - in the near future).
PRM - Partner Relationship Management. Third-party sales channel automation capabilities, allowing companies to distribute Leads, perform web-based sales, conduct promotions and establish discounts, etc. It also provides a mechanism for the initial partner to analyze the performance of its partners via analytics.
PSA -Professional Services Automation. These are services, now associated with CRM packages, that help automate the tasks of, say, a consulting company that offers Professional Services to clients. A PSA package might contain Quoting tools, Project Management Tools, personal time and expense reporting, as well as personnel optimization schemes, matching the customer need to the employee who is both capable and available to fill that need.
QBE - Query By Example. There are a lot of ways to search databases. You can submit keyword searches, conduct natural language searches, and you can perform a QBE. With a QBE, you use an existing screen to enter information into the various editable fields. The values you enter represent the criteria you want to use in your search. For example, if two fields contain a First Name and Last Name for a contact, and you wanted to find all the Joneses in the database, you would type 'Jones' in the Last Name field, and run the query. The query would return information on all the Joneses in the database.
QoE - Quality of Experience. It's no longer acceptable to simply produce a great product. Next year, the competition will have caught up, and maybe even surpassed you, on your features and functionality set. Instead, companies are now focusing on the more broad term Quality of Experience, which represents not only the strength of the product, but also the ease with which the customer can do business with the company, rounding out the customer's entire Experience with the company, from Sales, through Purchase, through Support.
QoS - Quality of Service. Not quite what you might think. It means, what level of network services are provided to each client on the network. Companies, having to deal with network and storage performance and capacity bottlenecks, are turning to this concept of QoS, where the level of service that is offered a user on the network may be prioritized, based on a certain set of criteria. For example, the CEO might demand the highest QoS at all times, and would be given preferential treatment at printer queues, storage devices, and network bandwidth.
Queues (Work Queues) - Repositories for work orders that one or more employees have access to. It's a collection of actionable items, from which employees select the items that they will personally work on, and move them to their WIP (Work in Process) bins, or personal queues (see definition of WIP bins, in Part 3 of this series).
RFI - Request For Information. A formal document sent by a customer to a vendor asking for specific information about their product or line of products. It's usually the first salvo in several rounds of information gathering by customers in the vendor selection process.
RFQ - Request For Quote. A formal document sent by a customer to a vendor asking them to put together a product and service package, with prices, for the customer to consider accepting and ultimately buying.
RMA - Returned Materials Authorization. Most companies require that customers contact them before returning previously-purchased product, to receive authorization to return the product. The customer is usually given an RMA number, for tracking purposes.
ROI - A calculation of how much money will be saved or earned as the result of an investment. When evaluating CRM packages, be sure to factor in investments of both time and capital in your ROI analysis
Rollback Capability - The ability of an RDBMS, in the case of a catastrophic failure, to be able to return to, or roll back to, a set point in time when the database was known to be stable. This is less preferred than the ability for an RDBMS to "fail-over" to a hot spare server, losing no data and suffering no down time in the process.
Sales Pipeline - This is the list of potential customers that the sales department is currently trying to convert into paying customers. Typically, customer deals in the pipeline are assigned dollar values and "percentages likely to convert", and from that, sales forecasts can be approximated.
SFA - Sales Force Automation. One of the lynchpins of CRM. This enables the Sales team to capture and maintain lead and other contact information in one data store, conduct team selling, view pipeline reports, and other tasks. This is still the first objective of most companies implementing CRM solutions.
TCO - Total Cost of Ownership. When evaluating software for possible implementation in your company, you can't just consider the costs of the software licenses, on-going maintenance fees, and support costs. You also need to consider how much time, and in turn, how much money, it will cost to own the software over the long term. Is the software very buggy and in need of constant bug updates and enhancements? Is the software difficult to use and therefore requires higher training costs and ramp-up times? TCO considers ALL the costs that might be associated with a piece of software over its lifespan in the company.
Thin Client - Another term for web browser. When an application vendor says that they have support for thin client, they mean that the majority of processing happens on back-end servers, and the display mechanism is the web browser, which conducts minimal (though, with Java or ActiveX plug-ins, possibly more substantial) processing of data.
TSBs - Technical Service Bulletins. Information distributed to the customer base of a product to inform them of some technical news bit that would be relevant to their implementation, such as the discovery of a new bug, the availability of a patch, or the availability of a new version of software.
VAR - Value-Added Reseller. This is a company, independent of an OEM, that takes an OEM product, adds some sort of customer-perceived value to it, repackages it, and sells it to customers on its own. The ways in which value might be added include the addition of new product functionality, or the wrapping of implementation services around the original product.
V-Commerce - Voice Commerce, or Voice-enabled Commerce. The ability to use simple voice commands over phone lines to transact business directly between customer and application. V-Commerce is still years away from true value-add for companies, though several companies are playing around with voice commands today.
Vertical Applications - Applications that are tailored to specific industries. For example, Siebel Systems might take their core application and tailor the screens, fields, and database structures to support the automotive industry (both sales and service). Their Siebel Automotive application would be an example of a vertical application.
ZLE - Zero Latency Enterprise. The latest, new-fangled term to come from the consulting world. It represents the Enterprise that is so technologically enabled that information is instantly accessible to anyone who needs it (or has need of it) at any time. Zero latency, or zero slowness, of information flow across an enterprise.
