EXPERT RESPONSE
One of the advantages of on-demand applications in a situation like this, where business process outsourcing (BPO) is being used, is that the application can be made accessible to any party in the company's business process network with proper security being observed. You could do the same thing with an in-house system, but you would be responsible for essentially building your own on-demand solution with a private network and all the rest. Who needs that?
CRM brings together all of the information about a customer in one location or database. There could be situations where you might be doing your job in North America while a part of service and support is taken care of by an on-demand call center in some other part of the world. Having a single version of the truth across all elements of an outsourced business process network is a great way to enable information sharing throughout an organization.
Much the same can be said of national accounts. Are you serving national accounts from regional offices that don't share information well? If so, you are losing a lot of valuable opportunities to serve your customers with consistent pricing, policies and services. Whatever the customer-facing business process, having the flexibility that an on-demand CRM system provides gives you the benefit of being able to see the big picture.
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