Customer Information Secure and Assessing

¶ … Customer Information Secure and Assessing Lifetime Customers Value In addition to being a provider of five different types of enterprise applications, Cincom Systems also is one of the leading providers of online hosting services throughout India and the Asian emerging economies.

The security technologies the company uses include extensive use of proxy servers, reliance on 256-bit encryption, and a multi-tenant cloud architecture that makes it possible to keep each customers' application separated in memory and disk storage on the servers throughout the company's data centers in Cincinnati, Ohio and Mumbai, India.

As cloud computing and SaaS-based applications continue to grow exponentially, Cincom is forced to support for advanced security architectures that emulate and are compatible with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) best practices that have emerged as a standard in the area of hosted application security. These security levels are also critical for keeping the key measures of lifetime customer value secured within the company's operations and finance departments.

The intent of this paper is to define these areas of the company's strategies and approaches to serving and managing customers, ending with an assessment of the CRM strategies implemented today and into the future. Securing Customers' Data and Applications Cincom has over the last several years created a hosting and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform in the data centers in Cincinnati, Ohio and Mumbai, Ohio that are based on the-based practices of hosted system security.

The focus on how to keep individual applications secure on distributed network systems has led to the company adopting single- and multi-tenancy architectures for the enterprise applications and systems sold. In addition, Cincom has begun to sell this as a service to companies looking to co-locate their own hosted or SaaS-based applications as well. The current security levels are based on 256-bit encryption, support for sign-on authentication and for larger government accounts, biometrics-based security and login procedures.

There are also auditing procedures to ensure the systems stay in compliance to customer specifications for security. All of these attributes also apply to the customer data stored on these internal systems as well. Cincom customer data is managed to a security level that the most critical government accounts globally are. This ensures the customer licensing, contract management and lifetime value data is managed as securely as possible.

In terms of measuring customer value and the measures of performance used to determine if it is worth investing in a customer, Cincom relies on lifetime contract value, the key metrics of inventory turns, price/earnings ratio if the company is public, quick ratio and gross margin levels to determine the financial viability of a new account. The Cincom CRM system also has areas where the sales teams can also enter in total contract value and the total budget for a given initiative as well.

Both internally gained financial information from within the customer and the reported financial results, more easily obtained if the customer is publicly held, go into deciding which customers are the most worth investing in over time. There are also analyses completed of the churn characteristics of certain customers. These profiles of high probability churn clients are used for narrowing down the customers who are going to be invested in for the long-term as well.

The company also looks at the average lifecycles of the customers' enterprise systems, creating an index of opportunity by system type over the life of a customer relationship. All of these factors are used for rank-ordering new prospect sales and for defining where up-sell and new contract renewals need to be focused. In aggregate, this approach has worked very well to prioritize sales person's time and efforts, leading to greater sales over time within existing and new accounts.