our take on crm 2.0
Go ahead and Google "CRM 2.0" and see what comes up. You'll get lots of helpful answers. It's Social CRM. It's the intersection of Web 2.0 technologies and CRM. It's the coming together of collaborative Enterprise 2.0 technologies and CRM. It's a new experience-driven mindset applied to CRM. It's cloud computing-delivered SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) CRM. It's a philosophy where the customer is in control. It's rapid start-with-vanilla-out-of-the-box CRM implementations. It's CRM without talking to the IT staff. It's customer-centric innovation. It's an outside-in view of CRM. It's about business intelligence and analytical CRM. It's old-school CRM done with a different mindset. It's CRM for small business.
Who's right?
They all are.
Rather than try to convince you that our definition of CRM 2.0 is the right one, we're simply observing that just about everything has changed for CRM and we call that collective group of changes "CRM 2.0". It's catchy, and it fits because it's genuinely an evolution of CRM technology and philosophy. Ask any CRM consultant that's been doing this as long as we have: they'll tell you the projects today are almost all intended to roll out functionality very quickly and significantly smaller in scope and time than traditional CRM.
how did we get here?
While the earliest seeds of CRM can be seen in some early mainframe and minicomputer applications, they didn't really become recognizably CRM-like applications until personal computers arrived with relational databases. The first applications were simply databases of contacts, most notably ACT! in 1986, but also custom database marketing applications written in dBase or similar languages. These applications were really intended to help in the largely clerical tasks that a salesperson or marketer might have to perform.
Later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, companies like Brock Control and Saratoga Systems built on contact managers and took advantage of laptops in the hands of sales representatives to automate their activities and drove the market for SFA (Sales Force Automation). At the same time, firms such as Scopus, Vantive and Clarify took advances in CTI (computer-telephony integration) to automate customer service and call centers. These departmental applications truly intended to support entire business processes performed within sales and customer service. Implementations were starting to get complicated, and expensive.
CRM as term became popular due almost entirely because of a single company called Siebel Systems. When Siebel acquired Scopus, consolidating the SFA and call center into one platform, CRM became an enterprise application. CRM crossed departmental boundaries and new client/server technologies allowed the automation of virtually any activities across sales, marketing and customer service and even into operations and finance. The systems were big, complicated, and expensive, and for that reason initially only targeted at the very largest firms.
Almost overnight, the Internet changed everything. People were randomly sticking the letter "e" in front of anything that touched the Internet. e-mail. e-commerce. e-business. e-everything. e-CRM. By letting CRM be delivered in a web browser, it could be delivered to almost any device, and most importantly, could be delivered directly into the hands of channel partners or customers themselves. The automated business process didn't stop at a company's employees, it just kept going and activities like order management and partner relationship management became natural extensions of CRM. Also, the technologies became mature enough so that mid-market firms started implementing CRM.
But the Internet didn't stop evolving, it became the delivery mechanism for the software itself, with salesforce.com the best example of this new style called cloud computing. At the same time, Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and Flash allowed for previously unseen levels of interactivity by browser-based applications, and Web 2.0 philosophies of collaboration launched social networks where the users controlled the content like Facebook and Twitter. Barriers that stopped traditional enterprise applications from working with other programs started to melt away as enterprise vendors adopted open approaches like SOA (services-oriented architectures). And speaking of open, did we mention open source CRM?
With all that, we find ourselves in the era of CRM 2.0, where now rather than just focusing on the novelty of automating activities that cross companies, it's on optimization of activities in collaboration with channels and customers. Also, the technologies are now finally available to any size firm, with any size budget, with or without an IT staff.
one size does not fit all
Most new implementations of CRM are cloud deployments, so SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) has been the most obvious change that most users notice with CRM 2.0. What used to be a very complex tangle of applications and technologies in order to get a screen where the user typed things in became a nice browser-based user interface with all the complexity neatly hidden away. Cloud-based CRM is also a convenient alternative way to pay for the software, with a subscription every month that includes all the upgrades rather than an up-front license.
But does that mean that cloud CRM is right for every single company in every single situation? No, although frankly it's so compelling you'd better have a really good reason not to assume your next CRM implementation isn't "on demand". But there are downsides, and we're not talking about the overhyped outages the press likes to focus on. Cloud-based applications are inherently less flexible than "on premise" because they can only be tailored or configured according to the rules set down by the vendor because all implementations are sharing the same live platform, so some types of customizations just cannot be done. Plus, the upgrade feature dilemma is the same as enterprise software: what do you do when the vendor adds a new feature that is similar, but not the same, as a feature you built yourself earlier?
We're not trying to talk you out of cloud CRM. The odds are nearly overwhelming that a cloud computing CRM solution is in your future. But sometimes, one size does not fit all.
As consultants we are trained to cringe at the word "easy" applied to enterprise business processes. We don't use that word lightly. Anyone who has worked with a a "Big 4" firm or other global systems integrator is probably laughing at the idea of a quick implementation of anything, as the simplest business problems take six months, a dozen or more big binders full of documents that are larger than the entire IRS tax code, and at least half a million dollars (USD) to solve. And yet, the majority of CRM 2.0 projects, cloud or otherwise, are quick, easy and targeted.
What's new is that companies that implement CRM now are looking to turn something on very quickly, learn from it, and then start extending it. This hardly guarantees success, as the same success factors from the past are just as important as before: business process and user adoption. But, the out-of-box "vanilla" CRM 2.0 application usually has a best-practice base of sales, marketing or customer services activities that can be minimally tweaked to get up and running in just a few weeks.
Key to success is to have a goal, knowing what business problems are trying to be solved with CRM or at least what exact functionality is being tried out. The difference between a good and bad implementation frequently comes down to the goals of the project, which means having an understanding of desired results. Have those? You'll probably have a good implementation and do what it takes to succeed. Don't have success criteria? Well then it's a bit unlikely you'll accidentally stumble into significant business benefit.
Another common issue is that the system may be a CRM 2.0 platform, but the philosophy behind it isn't particularly CRM 2.0. An example of this is that the success criteria or desired results are strictly focused on management, ignoring user expectations or needs. Without balancing the benefits between system users and management, even the greatest CRM 2.0 technology can't buy success.
The focus of new CRM implementations used to be massive customization efforts before a single user saw anything. Now, the focus of CRM 2.0 implementations is to take the out-of-box "vanilla" application and minimally tweak it so that it's useful. Rather than explore all the possible functionality, most of the tabs and functions are hidden in the first release to focus on the success criteria. And, before rolling it out to anyone, new implementations are doubly sure that at least one real business problem of each target user group is solved. Without that, it'll hard to get them to truly adopt the system.
And then it's turned on. And watched.
Often, once traditional CRM implementations were turned on, the train just kept rolling by jumping into the implementation of the next phase of features which were pre-determined months or years prior. Who is using the system? It didn't really matter, keep going. How are they using it? It didn't matter because the executive steering committee signed off on the new phase of work a long time ago. What related business problems can be solved? What could be done better? What's too complicated?
Those questions and more, with formal gathering of new requirements, are typical of CRM 2.0 implementations after go-live. Usually, certain tweaks and changes are made immediately as problems surface, while new functionality needs are gathered collaboratively with the users having a hand in driving innovation.
Integration was a big part of traditional CRM implementations, and the thinking that drove them was often all about deep integration with existing systems. With CRM 2.0, those same integrations still take place, but typically only after the application is in users hands. Usually, the prioritization of these integrations is done by business benefit, and what's new in CRM 2.0 is that the highest return-on-investment is frequently loosely-coupled data such as imports or external internet data to augment internal information.
CRM 2.0 implementations can be thought of as being alive and adapting to conditions. By this we don't mean that the technology itself is somehow intelligent, but that the implementation continues to adjust to how the users are behaving and the business needs. The system needs to continuously change, and the way this is done is by cycling between the monitor/gather and configure/integrate phases, so that the CRM 2.0 implementation evolves as the business evolves and reshapes to the users.
CRM 2.0 will become CRM
We call all this CRM 2.0, because it does seem to represent a new and different set of technologies and philosophies of how CRM is implemented. Right now, all these ideas seem very new and some even radical, and most projects just have a few aspects of what make up CRM 2.0. But over time, we predict these components will just become business as usual, and CRM 2.0 will just become CRM, which is really just a different way of saying sales, marketing and customer service working together.
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