IN THIS WHITEPAPER, YOU WILL LEARN:

IN THIS WHITEPAPER, YOU WILL LEARN:

• What Product Relationship Management is • Key benefits to implementing PRM

• How companies are using PRM for competitive advantage

• How to transform your business, department by department, with PRM • Where to get started

Product Relationship

Management:

The Killer

App Every Connected

Business Will Need

Index

3

4

7

9

10

12

Just as CRM technology was designed to help manage the

broader practice of customer relationship management, the IoT

is spawning new business practices centered on product

relationships, and a new class of technology – a new market –

to help companies manage these relationships.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Most business executives have heard the bold predictions about the Internet of Things (IoT)—that within five years there will be more connected “things” than PCs, smartphones, tablets and smart TVs combined (source: Business Insider). Many companies are investigating connected products. Some are actively piloting connected product initiatives. Others, early market pioneers, are already delivering connected products today, blazing new trails in their respective markets and forcing competitors to play catch up. But no matter where a business is in their IoT adoption cycle, there are lessons to be learned from the first movers. First, the connected product is an amazing direct connection to customers, partners and virtually anyone else that interacts with the product throughout its lifecycle. Second, creating the next big “must have” IoT product requires a whole new set of requirements to secure, manage, and support possibly tens of thousands of devices online. And third, common enterprise applications like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) weren’t designed to handle a new era where the voice of the product is really the voice of the customer.

This is Product Relationship Management (PRM), and like business enablement solutions before it, has the potential to both support and transform the way multiple functions – from product management to sales & marketing to customer care – better manage your business in the connected product age.

It also holds the potential to transform the way companies develop, transport, service, market and sell products. Early adopters of PRM stand to gain an unfair competitive advantage in their ability to better delight customers, unlock new revenue opportunities and spark new, enhanced relationships between a business and its ecosystem of customers, partners and vendors.

No matter where a

business is in their IoT

adoption cycle, there are

lessons to be learned

from the first movers.

Implementing PRM can give a voice to

connected products and their data so that key

constituents throughout a company can make

smarter decisions based on what those

products are telling them about their business.

finally have a direct link to end users of their products along with real-time, ongoing understanding of how those products get used.

PRODUCT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | 4

PRODUCT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT DEFINED

Product Relationship Management (PRM) is defined as a system for better managing a connected product company’s relationships with its customers, partners and vendors. PRM involves (but is not limited to) securely connecting products, managing these connected products (and the relationships they have with customers, partners, distributors and servicers), and even tapping into these connected products to directly engage and support customers. Since Internet of Things (IoT) products produce a lot of data, PRM focuses on how that data can be used to derive insight and can be selectively and securely shared between a product owner (the customer), the product manufacturer, and the relationships that various parties have with each other through a connected device. This data empowers a business to optimize those relationships on an ongoing basis to inform innovation, reimagine the customer experience they offer, and boost the lifetime value of customers.

Enterprise PRM applications intelligently organize data across multiple sources: from the device itself (telemetry), data about the devices (logs, device status, etc.), data about the users (identity, trust, data exhaust), to 3rd party cloud data that may be vital to how a customer interacts with a connected product. PRM systems leverage this data—and the connected devices themselves—to promote and strengthen ongoing relationships between business teams—i.e., service, sales, marketing, product

management, finance, operations—and each of their customers, vendors and partners.

Through PRM, companies finally have a direct link to end users of their products along with real-time, ongoing understanding of how those products get used. For example, by analyzing individual and aggregate customer product data, feature popularity or product usage history, manufacturers can build more reliable and compelling next-generation products that build a better brand and make customers happy. While such a relationship and such insight is old hat for digital businesses, it is

relatively unheard of for the vast majority of today’s companies, who have been long been reliant on focus groups, surveys and limited service data.

PRM

IoT Connectivity

PRM CAN ALSO HELP INFORM THE RELATIONSHIP between a manufacturer’s customer service & support team and its customers. As more traditionally unconnected products like coffee pots, garage door openers,

showerheads and lights become connected, manufacturers can now gather, analyze and create actions based on real-time service information pertaining to the product (or custom configuration settings that an installer may have applied) to delight customers in new ways.

The Internet of Things is finally here. And as more connected products come online, a sense of expectancy is quickly emerging for both the producer and the user of these products. PRM has the potential to become as ubiquitous to companies selling connected products as CRM and ERP systems are in the business world today.

Company

Customers

Products

PRM has the potential to become as ubiquitous to companies selling connected products as CRM and ERP systems are in the business world today.

PRODUCT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (PRM) DEFINED

Product Relationship Management (PRM) is defined as a system for better managing a connected product company’s relationships with its customers, partners and vendors.

CR

M

ER

P

/

PL

M

The Internet of Things is finally here. And

as more connected products come online,

a sense of expectancy is quickly

emerging for both the producer and the

user of these products.

PRM will transform the way that virtually every department makes mission-critical business decisions on a daily basis. Data generated from connected products can transform insights into actions that were previously “dark”— totally unknowable, inaccessible or unmeasurable — and enhance operations across the board. It’s important to examine how each job function within a business may see immediate benefit from PRM. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Today, most product development teams rely on gut instinct and intuition almost as much as they do on measurable data, when deciding how to design and bring new solutions to market. PRM promises to significantly tip the scales in favor of data-driven decision-making. Data generated by connected devices provides measurable insights into how customers engage with a product or service and how the product itself is functioning.

Imagine that the CEO of a garage door manufacturer wants an IoT version of their existing garage door product line to be a top priority. Typically, the product development team would interview what it thought was a representative sample of the target audience, look at support tickets to identify issues with the previous generation of products, and then begin prototyping. A final set of prototypes might make it into the hands of a user testing or focus group, and then the product would go into formal production. With a connected product the manufacturer will be able to better inform future iterations of the product, but without this connected version of the product they still have to rely on focus groups.

The impact of PRM on common

business functions and roles.

Today, most product

development teams rely on gut instinct and intuition almost as much as they do on measurable data, when deciding how to design and bring new solutions to market.

WHILE THE DETAILS of such a process may vary by company, we can safely make a few generalizations about challenges all companies face. Most of these challenges appear in the form of nagging questions that the product development team has only partial insight into. Such questions introduce uncertainty and risk into the design process, such as:

V

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT

PRM can also provide customer support teams unparalleled insight into support issue diagnostics and resolution. Imagine that you are a customer of the garage door company described above. You get in your car and push the button the garage door opener above the visor like always, but instead of opening the door all you hear is a loud “KATHUNK”. And of course Murphy’s Law also tells us that you have a big presentation in an hour too. Your first step is usually to try pressing the UP and DOWN buttons a few times just for good measure, before getting out of the car and looking at the garage door’s pulley and spring ensemble. Since you’re not a garage door engineer, chances are you’re stuck at this point. Somehow you’ll need to find either the warranty card or a sticker on the garage door rail with a customer service number on it. • Is the product we are building representative of the

entire customer and prospect base?

• Are there any fringe use-case scenarios that are quickly ballooning into big issues?

• People on the team have varying opinions about things such as interface design. Have we obtained enough data about the direction all of our users would prefer?

• Do we have a deep understanding of all of the part breakdown scenarios happening in our customer base so that we can isolate and redesign problem components?

• If we issue a critical software update or even a product recall, how will we deploy it across our customer base?

PRM promises to greatly reduce

risk and improve certainty by

providing real-time insights into:

• Usage patterns of product features, including how each and every user interacts with the user interface. • Further analysis of error scenarios that go beyond an error log to show a full trail of events that caused a certain problem or support ticket, while also predicting how many other customers might eventually be affected.

• The ability to remotely identify firmware versions and push mission-critical updates, completely removing any burden on the customer to take any action whatsoever.

THEN BEGINS A LONG, tedious process of asking when and where you purchased the product. Chances are you may have just bought the house and have no leads for them about any of this information. The

conversation likely will end with you needing to find a garage door repairman, then wait an additional 4-6 days for the part he or she ordered to arrive. That’s a lot of downtime and customer frustration that can negatively impact the manufacturer’s brand and, over time, cause customers to shop around for other garage door options.

Now lets look at this from the perspective of the connected garage door manufacturer. By adding an Internet-enabled product with a PRM solution, the company can now extrapolate critical customer usage and product performance data, as well as integrate with back-end support systems. The company would automatically know which part of the garage door system caused the halt, triggering back-end systems to analyze whether the error is either a) easily fixable or b) representative of a common part failure across the installed base.

If easily fixable, an instructional animation could automatically be pushed to the customer’s smartphone to help resolve the issue. If the problem is caused by a part failure, the garage door could automatically create a service ticket with the exact model number, part number and service instructions that could be sent along with local repair vendors. The garage door manufacturer could email or call to schedule a technician repair appointment before the customer even needs to pick up the phone to call support. No more lengthy scripts to find out basic customer information. The company would instantly know basic customer information, what the problem is, and quickly schedule the service call and/or remotely push a firmware update to the device. Instead of dreading interactions with customer service, the connected product support experience will likely be pleasant and the resolve time much faster and hassle-free.

SALES AND MARKETING

Managing connected device data within an enterprise PRM application also has a transformational impact on the way a company markets and sells products. Let’s continue with our connected garage door opener company example. Using a PRM solution, the garage door company can aggregate customer and product data, and then synchronize it with their CRM tool to empower the sales team with rich

purchasing information. Based on certain PRM data pertaining to customer usage, there may be opportunities to upsell or cross-sell across other products the company offers.

The marketing team can also aggregate usage data to improve customer acquisition initiatives. For instance, they can

cross-reference device data generated by current customers with customer

demographic profiles (such as titles and industries). Using this information, they can create targeted campaigns based on behavioral data as opposed to demographic data and best guesses about who their customers actually are and what products they prefer to use.

It’s like having a large, ever-evolving focus group that constantly feeds information into the marketing organization, making its efforts smarter and more targeted with every new bit and byte of information. The end result is that customers feel less like they are being marketed or sold to, and instead are given helpful information that makes life a little bit easier.

It should be clear by now that building an IoT product requires far more than just cloud connectivity. Successful connected product manufacturers will need to account for a network of complex relationships that were unforeseeable in the past. Our garage door opener company now needs to manage connected product data shuttling between potentially millions of garage doors, external software systems, the company’s other

connected products, home automation protocols like Thread or HomeKit, distributors, installers, general contractors, potentially numerous home owners, repair technicians, and others needing temporary access to the garage like painters or visitors from out of town.

Managing the relationships between all of these actors in the system is no small feat. A PRM solution makes sense of the many new relationships opened up among the people, Things, and existing software systems wanting access to your connected product data. The key to orchestrating this data flow requires knowledge of how the right data needs to get to the right location at the right time. A good PRM enterprise SaaS application will identify the durable data only, and deliver it to the right places in the business so it adds value for the customer and other constituents. This is why “management” is at the heart of a successful PRM solution.

And once connectivity concerns are addressed and relationship complexity is organized efficiently, your company will already have the right PRM processes in place to better engage with all of the partners and customers in your IoT ecosystem.

A connected product world

THE COMPLEXITIES OF RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT IN THE IOT

• A lot of software is required to implement these functions. • Security and scalability present significant challenges.

• Companies with physical products have added risks.

Product Company

Garage Door

Opener

Product App

Customer

Service

Company

Channel

Partner

Service & Support Agreement Subscriptions &

Usage Agreement

The Internet of Things is upon us. By using PRM within your

company, you can make sure your customers benefit to the fullest

degree. By empowering companies with unparalleled insights into

the relationships they—and their connected products— have with

customers, installers, resellers, service firms and supply chain

vendors, PRM will transform how companies develop, sell, market

and support their products.

GETTING STARTED WITH PRM. While many businesses understand the need to create connected products, it can be difficult to know how to get started with the IoT and PRM. Here are 5 things to look for in a PRM partner to help you navigate the complex world of IoT:

3. RESEARCH YOUR PROSPECTIVE PARTNER’S STABILITY

Because of the promise of the IoT, dozens of new startups pop up daily. Some of these startups hold the keys to important pieces in the PRM puzzle, but business need to be wary of tying themselves too closely to a company that may not be around in a year. The IoT is not a short-term bet, but a long term vision.

4. PRM AS CONNECTIVE TISSUE

The right partner should understand PRM, and that it is the unifying force that will work with your existing CRM, ERP and other business systems to make your company truly connected.

2. LOOK BEYOND CONNECTING

There are many companies already able to help businesses create connected products, but just connecting your products to the Internet doesn’t ensure PRM success. Make sure your IoT partner delivers a solution that manages the data from those connections and enables deeper engagement with customers.

1. THINK OF SECURITY FIRST

Connected products come with them inherent risks around security. Make sure your IoT partner has deep experience connecting people and devices securely.

Xively by LogMeIn offers an

award-winning Internet of Things

product relationship management

solution for enterprises building

connected products and services.

Xively enables companies to securely and robustly connect their products, manage data from those connections, and engage more closely with their customers. Our solution gives physical products a voice in the relationships that they facilitate between a

company and all of its constituents (customers, partners, vendors, installers, etc.) in order to better develop, market, sell and support the next generation of connected products.

LogMeIn (Nasdaq:LOGM) transforms the way people work and live through secure connections to the

computers, devices, data, and people that make up their digital world. The company's cloud services free millions of people to work from anywhere, empower IT

professionals to securely embrace the modern

cloud-centric workplace, give companies new ways to reach and support today's connected customer, and help businesses bring the next generation of connected products to market.

ABOUT XIVELY BY LOGMEIN