The story of CRM through my own interpretation of the facts. (Part two)

Following chapters 1 to 4, this second part chapters 5 to 8 resumes the story of CRM through my own interpretation of the facts.Happy reading!Chapter 5: The integration of office productivity suites

  • The developers of the contact management software, quickly tried to link the office productivity suites (Office, word perfect) with their own applications. The first attempts were not very successful ones.
  • The developers had a multiplicity of functioning adapters during their demo, but due to their instability, these same adapters became an extra obstacle to the integration process.
  • “Outlook clients”, “CRM for outlook” or other implementations such as “Excel” or “Word” have all known very difficult beginnings. These four components are now crucial to the incomparable functionality of the CRM regardless of the chosen application.

Chapter 6: The customer relationship management phenomenon

  • In the 1990’s, developers talked about SFA(Sales Force Automation)
  • At around the same time, the Gartner group popularized the term “Customer Relationship Management”, CRM.
  • At the end of the 1990’s, the CRM concept was used in sales, marketing and customer service.
  • The CRM applications and suites had now found their place in large companies. The implementation of these suites and applications was quite costly and risky, the rate of usage was pretty low and glitches were numerous, despite all of this, the CRM phenomenon was made to stay.

Chapter 7: The process automation

  • The manner in which applications and platforms were evolving, allowed for more complex business processes configuration capacities.
  • CRM applications offered standard processes for sales and customer care. Certain applications even provided the possibility of personalizing them.
  • At around the same time, the measurement and reporting components started becoming accessible through the CRM applications. The usage of more robust technologies such as SSRS and Cristal Report were transferred onto a more simple software such as Excel.

Chapter 8: Mobile access

  • The creation of smart phones and different PDA’s accelerated the link between mobile devices and CRM.
  • The first initiatives were very costly and difficult.
  • Quite often the synchronization was fastidious compromising the quality of data.
  • The fast growing expansion of platforms and the multitude of devices has rendered mobile accessibility to be inevitable.

Once again, my interpretation of the facts does not end here, the next four chapters will follow shortly. In the meantime, I would like to know your opinion, is CRM a tactic or a strategy?I am curious to know your interpretation of the facts!Sylvain

The story of CRM through my own interpretation of the facts. (Part two)