They say you must walk before you can run. It follows that you should crawl before you walk.
In CRM, however, there are a lot of businesses that talk at great length about wanting to run even though they haven’t mastered crawling yet. They battle with the same old problems: adoption issues; technology decisions made before business needs are identified; lack of executive buy-in.
If you want to extend the metaphor, CRM-wise, they’re not running, walking or crawling — they’re lying face-down, motionless, on the floor.
It’s enough to make you want to cry, especially if you’ve seen CRM working as it can and should, and if you’ve talked with CRM’s big thinkers. Years ago, they identified technologies that would elevate CRM to an increasingly important role in business — technologies so well attuned to businesses’ CRM needs that even neophytes could quickly understand how they could be applied, and the enormous value they could bring.
However, we’re not there yet. As the elite CRM users build their abilities, the gap between them and the CRM rank-and-file grows greater and greater.
These three technologies eventually will revolutionize CRM — but the revolution has been slow in coming. What’s holding them back?
Mobile CRM
Social CRM has commanded much of the discussion about CRM over the last seven years, but as one CRM vendor CEO told me, “people ask about social but they buy because of mobile.” Even so, successful mobile CRM integrations are still the exception and not the rule. Why is that?
Part of it is because putting CRM on mobile is not a plug-and-play thing. You don’t just take your existing CRM application and jam it onto a smartphone — that doesn’t work. Instead, you have to think about what you want to put into a mobile CRM application.
It should be about the data that’s entered into CRM via mobile devices, with access to some critical content. Determining which data and which content requires some thinking, along with a reassertion of the goals of the organization’s CRM effort in general. Sadly, most companies haven’t done much thinking about CRM in general.
As businesses struggle to understand what they really want from CRM, the struggle to create mobile apps that reflect those goals naturally must wait.
You can slow mobile, but you can’t stop it. It’s transforming all kinds of business software, but that software has clearer, more specific, and less flexible uses and goals — and that makes it easier to go mobile. CRM will get there, but many people thought it would be there by now.
Business Intelligence
There’s no shortage of BI products in this era of analytics. CRM data can yield exciting new insights with the aid of these applications — and if those insights are applied, the data locked within CRM customer records can provide significant competitive advantages.
One thing limiting BI from achieving major results in some companies is the thing that CRM was supposed to solve: silos between business units. Many of the most useful insights come from correlations between sales and marketing efforts, but the walls between these organizations still exist, even in businesses where CRM has been in place for years.
CRM often came in as something for sales, with the promise that it would be extended to marketing. Meanwhile, as marketing automation software emerged, it too entered a specific part of the business.
Unless CRM and marketing automation are integrated, running analytics on the two in a way that yields results about the effectiveness of marketing becomes extremely difficult, and finding those insights can force companies back to manual processes — which defeats the purpose of having automation software in the first place.
Social CRM
As people change the way they communicate, CRM has had to change too. That’s why social CRM has commanded so much bandwidth over the years, and why smart people predict the demise of the term as social functionality becomes something that is an inherent and vital part of CRM applications.
The problem is twofold: Many businesses have yet to understand what to do with social CRM information, and CRM vendors have yet to turn out a true social CRM application. Many of them have one aspect or two. They can scrape social data into customer records, or they include activity streams or collaboration components, etc.
However, these are social analogs of traditional CRM data-collecting techniques, and they emphasize the social activities the vendor engages in to reach customers. They do nothing to aid with applying business rules to listening and responding to the most important conversations occurring in forums that are not Facebook, Twitter, Linked In or YouTube — or those controlled by the vendor.
Some companies have resorted to assembling their own solutions and engaging in extensive integration. This isn’t the kind of effort that small businesses can afford, so ultimately it will be up to the vendors to create a genuine, fully featured social CRM application to bring about the day when social truly is going to revolutionize CRM — not just CRM for some businesses, but for all of them.
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Great read Chris.
Unfortunately CRM is identified with technology and Tools however it is beyond Technology, which is just a means to establish, maintain and grow relationships.
CRM is primarily at the disposal of the sales folks,majority of them feel it’s an obligation to use the CRM tools rather appreciating it.
Given above situation we might at first feel that Social CRM will make it all the more difficult for the sales people, as it adds one more dimension i.e. Social to the traditional CRM however I feel this new dimension will give a completely different outlook to the sales person, as it will add a more dynamic layer i.e. Social to the CRM, thus making the CRM practice much more effective and usable.
Much of the complaint goes away now about it taking too much time entering information from a phone call on a mobile device. Smart phones, tablets and web browsers like Chrome allow you to tap a microphone icon with one finger and immediately start talking. The speech is immediately converted into text as a call memo. Amazing feedback can be obtained in timely matter.
Dick Wooden
Saleslogix CRM business partner
I read somewhere else that one of the reasons mobile CRM fails in practice is because people dislike entering or managing rich information on their devices. If you end a phone call with a client, for example, it takes a lot of effort to type and attach a summary of the call to the Client’s record in your CRM on your phone. It’s just not practical, even in tablet form.
If CRM "management" was made more intuitive on mobile, perhaps adoption rates would increase.
I feel you are right about Social CRM; companies do not yet know how to harvest the mounds of information present in these channels. Besides aggregation, we know not what to do with this data. Personally, I still feel most business professionals don’t use Social Media for business.