Infor CRM Epiphany: Review

By Partho, Gaea News Network
Monday, April 13, 2009

infor_headerWe are done with a number of Customer Relationship Management software. Again we picked up a CRM software from my list of Top 10 CRM software. This time we got hold of the Infor CRM Epiphany. It is a comprehensive customer relationship management software that integrates marketing, sales, and service. The software is modeled on the basis of B2B or B2C solutions. It is based on the Infor Open Architecture, a service oriented architecture platform built on the J2EE technology. This solution is designed to drive intelligent customer interaction. The CRM provides an ecosystem for intelligent customer interactions at every point. For a broader look at the software let’s get into it’s features.

Key Features

Marketing

Infor features inbound and outbound marketing potential that streamlines the campaign process. It creates real-time customer profile that is helpful while identifying high impact offers. The marketing feature involves solutions for planning campaign, execution and management of campaign as well as lead and list management.

Sales force automation

The top priority is opportunity management that provides instant access to recently created, modified, or viewed opportunity records. It provides a opportunity list views. The user can also access multiple opportunity data record layouts. It can be used to define the opportunities with different selling processes and data needs. The workflow engine in the Infor software enables implementation of best possible opportunity management practices. The pre-designed charts and graphs of the sales analytics are displayed on the dashboard and reports.  The sales force automation and opportunity management potential drives intelligence into the customer interaction.

Customer service and support

Infor CRM scores high with customer service and support. It includes creation of new cases (Service Requests),  assigning cases, raising unresolved cases and solving and closing cases. It creates and maintains knowledge base as well as customer self-service portal for users.

Service

The software serves as the basis for personalized contact center operations. It provides the customer service representatives a 360 view of the customer.

Infor SOA

Infor’s open service-oriented architecture (SOA) assists the companies to evolve their business system according to their needs selecting criterias to take advantage of new and additional Infor solutions.

Pros

  • Infor CRM enables consistent and continuous customer dialogue at real-time information.
  • The CRM enables real-time customer decision management
  • It enables synchronization of sales efforts
  • The sales force automation is ideal for hospitality industries

Cons

There are no significant shortcomings that I could make out of the software.

Conclusion

On a whole, Infor CRM Epiphany seems to be a complete solution for optimization of customer relationships integrating marketing, sales, and service. If there are certain things sill to be added let me know.
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Discussion

speadmarks
June 10, 2010: 11:11 am

I am going to have to agree with Michael on this one. The software has been improved.

Michael
April 17, 2009: 7:24 am

“There are no significant shortcomings that I could make out of the software.”

Congratulations, you have found the perfect software application… or you have not even seen the Epiphany CRM tool. I think it’s the second case which is closer to the truth.

As an ex customer of Epiphany ‘suite’ of CRM tools in North America I can offer you the following.

Cons. Lets start shall we..
The ‘suite’ consists of 4 applications which are in no way integrated. i.e. it is not possible to generate offers using the Inbound Marketing product and expose them in the call centre (without extensive professional services). Another example there is no integration what so ever between the inbound and outbound marketing programs.
Its expensive.. really expensive
Implementation times for a single application are in excess of 6 months. Software to implementation cost ratio is over 1:2. i.e. it costs twice as much to implement the software than the license costs. (see 2 above)
Let’s take a quick look at the individual components: Inbound marketing. Great idea in 2002 when the company acquired the technology but as it has hardly changed since then. Yeah the user interface is web based but its ugly as hell and is hard to use.
Outbound Marketing. Another product that has not changed since 2003. No out of the box channel integration. No content management capability, expensive to implement, ugly UI. Basically all this product does is create a list of individuals. That’s it.. end of story. IT CREATES A LIST OF CUSTOMERS. Would you pay in excess of 500kUSD + implementation to create lists. Then pay 5OOk+ more to implement that list in a channel? Don’t get me started on the email send engine. That part of the product is quite possible the lowest quality software product I have seen in 20 years of IT experience.
Sales – old, slow, expensive, difficult to implement. Don’t waste your 400k+ and use salesforce.com
Service. See above. Also they probably have one or less customers using the product. Internally its known as a joke. Try adding a new field to the data model an displaying on the screen using the configuration tool. That will be 3 weeks work Mr. Customer please.
Infor. They sell ERP systems to medium and small business. The CRM product from Epiphany is a real black sheep.
The suite is not being developed, there is no expertise for support, the sales staff move in and out like a revolving door, the moral in the company is low and the great majority of the people let either don’t give a hell about the product or are basically clueless of its benefits.
They have sold basically nothing for a very very long time.

I could go on (and on and on) but I think you get the picture. The product was OK in 2002, now it’s dead. There are far far superior CRM solutions out there. My recommendation, don’t spend your time evaluating Epiphany or if you do make sure they are in your short list and use them as leverage in price negotiations with your preferred vendor. They discount very heavily.
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