CRM.COM Platform overview

Introduction

This document provides an overview of how the CRM.COM platform powers the customer economy, enabling businesses to transition from standard transactions to personalised offerings and B2B communities.

In the following sections, we outline the product structure and the primary components of the CRM.COM Platform, accompanied by brief descriptions. The strategic combination of these components empowers users to independently deploy the full spectrum of services offered by the CRM.COM platform.

Intended for integrators and key users, this document offers insights into the CRM.COM platform's capabilities across the core functional areas of its four products, tailored to various vertical industries.

CRM.COM Product Positioning

CRM.COM is a complete solution that caters to all your needs as a customer focused organisation that aims to increase repeat monetisation. It offers four distinct products, which can be configured as part of an integrated journey:

  1. Identity Management: Efficiently onboard and manage your customers. Provide seamless omnichannel self-service access. Utilise a flexible wallet spend model to capture purchases and segment your customer base into micro-personas.

  2. Commerce Wallet and Digital Promotions: Create and manage promotional and reward offers tailored to specific customer segments. The commerce wallet maintains commerce and open balances and supports various customer payment methods.

  3. Subscriptions and Commerce: Leverage an advanced product catalogue, versatile ordering mechanisms and a robust subscription platform. CRM.COM handles from straightforward termed services to XaaS (Anything as a Service) and intricate usage-based triple play and IoT scenarios, including triple-play services.

  4. Business Communities: Establish your business network to enhance your brand and expand your service offerings. Engage with B2B community services and products, fostering collaborations and synergies. Jointly create promotions with your partners and aggregate a wider array of services and products.

CRM.COM provides an end-to-end solution for running your customer economy effectively and efficiently, with the flexibility to configure these products to meet your unique needs.

CRM.COM Platform - The Big Picture

Here, we outline the components of the CRM.COM platform and its four products, their corresponding features and processes and the essential software components that play a pivotal role.

4 Products and Key Features/processes covered

The following table presents how the CRM.COM Platform deploys the customer economy concept through its product journey and supported functionality (e.g. processes and components).

 

Membership Product

Key features and process coverage

Components/Modules

Membership Product

Key features and process coverage

Components/Modules

Identity Management

  • Identity management and self-service API

  • The ready-made app, portal and mobile passes; app and portal published by the service owner

  • Transaction Processor and POS integration capturing customer purchases and spending requests

  • Segment customers into multiple micro-personas using the advanced CRM.COM embedded BI

  • contacts

  • customer events

  • apps & portals

  • communications

  • service requests

  • analytics (identity management)

  • activities

  • leads

Commerce Wallet and Digital Promotions

  • CRM.COM wallet maintains customer open balance, business open balance, and business commerce balance's wallet

  • Fintech wallet with top-up, transfer, payout, spend specifically designed to transact at your point of sales or those of your B2B community

  • Frictionless flows with promotion-based aggregation. Capture the purchase and apply offers refunding into the wallet

  • wallet

  • passes

  • accounts

  • payments methods

  • rewards & digital offers

Subscriptions & Commerce

  • An enterprise-class product catalogue allows the brand to easily set up even the most complex product offering, termed or physical.

  • Order to fulfil or order to subscribe advanced promotions

  • Subscribe on any billing model: pre-pill, payment-driven, post-bill and for multiple frequencies

  • Diverse subscription models: Termed, Usage (real-time charging, allowance based), hybrid termed and usage

  • Subscription support for a diverse product range: from triple play (voice, data, video) to digital services to usage products (IoT, energy, FMCG, HoReCa)

  • Extensive support of global and local payment gateways and the ability to plug in your local gateways

  • Inventory and device management

  • An enterprise-class provisioning layer for multiple triple plays and IoT platforms (WIFI, broadband, telephony, OTT video) and the ability to plug in your local provisioning providers

  • product catalogue

  • order management

  • Subscriptions & Usage

  • Inventory

Business Communities

  • A platform topology, with Platform Owner, Service Owner, Business, Merchants (the business network)

  • B2B Spend: Customers spend their open balance across the business network. Accept the wallet of another business.

  • B2B Connect. Be a B2B Merchant of another business or enjoy other businesses being your B2B Merchants. Do joined promotions and engage in commerce with your B2B connections

  • B2B Commerce Pools. Publish or auction your idle capacity for partners to sell or provide as a gift, benefit, or promotion.

  • B2B Promotion-based aggregation. Your customers subscribe and buy complimentary products from other businesses with the wallet as identity (gym membership, TV subscription) with offers adding discounts to the wallet. Addressing the use case of purchasing from my partner and contributing a portion of the better price I negotiated to your wallet

  • B2B Commerce-based aggregation. Sell from your product catalogue services and products of 3rd parties, and take charges as purchase events reconciled to your invoicing.

  • Business Network & B2B

  • Security & Foundation

  • Settlements

Platform core components

In the following table, you can find all the main components of the CRM.COM platform, along with a brief description of their purpose/functionality.

The purpose of this table is to make it clear for each integrator/key user what the main components of the platform are and ultimately have an idea of their primary functions.

Item

Description

Contacts

Contact is the central process of the software, representing the customer of the Business. Contacts can be created in 3 ways:

  • Created as part of an import and using the back office API

  • Created via UI back-end

  • Self Service Registration

Customer Events

  • Support for Purchase, achievement, and referral events

  • Customer identification based on contact id, wallet code, contact code, CIM, gift card number, OTP

Apps & Portals

 Apps & Portals is a utility of CRM.COM that allows a key user to configure the business front-end tools with no code: Native APP and Portal.

These front-end tools allow the customers of the Business, the contacts, to carry out numerous self-service processes such as registering, ordering or buying a subscription.

Communications

Communication with your contacts with easy to built personalised html templates. It can be generated by via a Communication Plan or an event-based communication.

System-generated communications are multi-channel, currently supporting Email, SMS, and in-app Push Notifications.

Service Requests

It is a request ticket for service by a contact to the Business.

Service requests can be submitted by a back-office user or directly by a contact via self-service APIs (e.g., CRM.COM app or portal).

A service request always belongs to a Queue. A Queue is a CRM.COM user-defined grouping method that is used to group similar service requests (e.g., reward or billing requests)

Analytics for Identity management product

CRM.COM Analytics provide an in-depth analysis of a business's data aiming in:

  • View the Business's performance in various aspects such as financials, contacts behaviour (purchases, awarding), as well as the implementation of various organisations within the business network

  • Enabling in-time decision-making by checking out behaviour patterns such as service churns, MRR

Activities

An Activity is a task that can be scheduled to take place for a Contact and can optionally refer to a Lead, Service Request or Order.

Leads

Leads denote prospective Business by a contact.

A lead belongs to a queue, usually representing a Sales Force Automation model with predefined stages.

A lead always ends up being won or lost.

Wallet

  • An EMI-grade multi-currency wallet maintaining an open balance per currency and multiple commerce pool balances for a customer of a business

  • The multi-business wallet allows customers to link their existing wallet to a new business they sign up for. Business still maintains full ownership and control of the business balances.

Passes

A pass is a process that unlocks a gift, top-up or promotion for a contact.

When a pass is redeemed (unlocked), it will either credit money into the contact wallet or activate an instant discount because of an associated offer.

A pass can be either printed or in electronic format (distribution methods).

Accounts

An account is a ledger of financial transactions carried out between the Business and its contacts or the Business and its merchants/service providers. Account basic features are id, classification, credit term (credit limit, payment terms), currency, primary, and state.

Payment Methods

Payment methods are the acceptable means by which a business can collect money from its contacts to pay for products or services purchased from the Business.

Rewards & Digital Offers

Rewards within CRM.COM apply digital offers against a customer event or a CRM.COM-initiated process such as subscription maturity. Rewards award contacts a commerce credit in the CRM.COM wallet.

A key Rewards process is the Redeem, which evaluates the purchase event against the existing commerce balance and converts it to an open balance.

Product Catalogue

The product catalogue consists of the list of products a business sells, their prices, and promotions applied to purchasing these products.

A key product attribute is the organisation that owns the Product, which can be the Business or a merchant/service provider. The organisation that owns the Product will also manage it and price it.

Order Management

Orders placed by contacts (B2C/B2B contacts) to purchase physical goods and services offered by the Business or the Business's merchants in its business network

An Order is fulfilled by either the Business or one of the merchants/venues (Delivery, Pick Up, Direct Sale)

An Order follows a Queue that defines its :

  • The sequence of stages that the order goes through until its completion

  • The point of no return

  • Milestone invoicing in one or more stages

Subscriptions & Usage

A subscription is a collection of services a Contact subscribes to, billed for regularly. Apart from the services provided, the subscription outlines how and when the Contact will be billed and the payment terms. Generally, a subscription's main characteristics are State, Billing day, and Payment method.

A usage service is any service consumed and has to be billed based on the volume consumed, like data, phone calls, fuel, and electricity. A usage service has a measurement unit for measuring the consumed volume and a price per measurement unit. A usage service can only be consumed when a contact subscribes to a termed or one-time service.

Inventory (including devices)

  • The Business has a single Warehouse to keep track of their stackable physical goods balances. Created on sign up

  • The Warehouse maintains a dimension called locations, which allows stock to be allocated (assigned) to any logical dimension, such as a location in the Warehouse, an installer van or a service provider.

  • Stackable items are the physical goods for which stock levels are maintained. Only physical goods (traceable or not) can be marked as stackable in their product types.

Business Network & B2B

Business Network is the CRM.COM organisation topology, with Platform Owner, Service Owner, Transaction Processor, Business, Merchants, Venues and B2B connections. B2B connections are the Organizations of the Business that are B2B Merchants or B2B Peers.

Security & Foundation

Security allows setting policies governing access and actions permissions to CRM.COM system features, ranging from creating API keys for client-external applications to setting up user roles and inviting users. Security settings cover all organisations of the CRM.COM Business Network structure (e.g., Cloud Operator, Business, Merchant/Service Provider).

The foundation covers other global functionalities of the CRM.COM Platform like automation, Custom fields & forms, Time travel, Approvals, Events & Logs.

Settlements

The process where awards and spending are settled between businesses

 

 

A detailed list of business features by Product and associated Component is provided HERE. Referred to as Components master data and updated on 15 April 2023. The next update is scheduled for July 2023.

 

CRM.COM Platform Core Flows

See how the four products of the CRM.COM platform are applied in distinct services.

CRM.COM Platform Processes

Understand the platform's capabilities and workflows to effectively implement CRM.COM solutions and meet specific business requirements.

CRM.COM Platform Technology Architecture

Find out what the CRM.COM platform is comprised of