Following my last post on CRM, Dennis Howlett posted a comment which triggered some off-line discussion. Dennis, in common with many I know, has a real downer on anything CRM related because of bad experiences in the past, and because the acronym itself is associated with a particular set of technology, when it should stand for so much more. Let me explain.
If you go the best known provider of CRM software, Siebel, and go to their page defining “What is CRM?“, the first sentence is this:
“CRM is an integrated approach to identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers.”
If you look at their “helpful” diagram it looks like this:
Notice that all the arrows are pointing at the customer, with none coming out. This encapsulates the issue. Most CRM products focus on helping a firm manage the sales side of their relationship and the sales pipeline. Some have functionality to cover help desk and call centre processes. Most never get beyond these things. These software products shouldn’t be called CRM at all. They are Sales Relationship Management (SRM) tools. They are necessary in any organisation, but the only help they provide the customer is indirectly, in that the firm does a better job of interacting with the customer because they have more accurate data, or the firm does a more organised job of pushing material out to the client. They are focused internally on the firms processes, push material out. They don’t cover all of the other sides of the relationship, a two way dialogue, or things the customer may want from our organisation.
If you go to CRMGuru, which is a good resource for real CRM topics, and you read their top 10 most popular articles, all of them are related to the customer experience. They are outward looking, rather inward looking. Most of them never mention “so called” CRM software, and where they do, for example in an article about China, it’s like this:
“quite a large portion of people still think CRM means software or even a call centre.”
Current CRM software still has a place, because any firm needs that part of the job done, but it should be viewed as a commodity product that I need as part of my business system, like the Sales Ledger. It would be much better if we could rename the current range CRM products to Sales Relationship Management (SRM), and think of a completely new term for the all of the tools and things we do to enhance the customer/supplier or client/adviser relationship to distance the topic from the bad reputation that CRM has. We need more business people like Philip Woodgate who “get it” - who think like this:
“Practice management software that is integrated with other applications such as Outlook, Accounting System, CRM, Wiki could act as the hub of our business.”
So CRM software is a necessary component, but we’ll have to give it a different name.
Technorati Tags : CRM, Siebel, ERP, practice+management
Technorati Tags : CRM, Siebel, ERP, practice+management
Powered By Qumana
