social crm

The top CRM stories of 2009

As 2009 draws to a close (thankfully), it’s time, as we do every year, to look back on some of the major developments in the CRM market.

This year is not as easy as some. Gone are the heady days of CRM news, like in 2005 when all this took was throwing acquisitions, such as the Aspect-Concerto and Oracle-Siebel deals on a list, on a list with innovations, like CDI and Microsoft CRM 3.0. Even the top CRM stories of 2008 were easier to define.

But while the year was light on major acquisitions and suddenly-hot technologies, it was not without its shake-ups and developments. With the dust slowly settling on the market leaders and the major suite vendors firmly in place, 2009 became a time for everyone, including users, to regroup and map out where they’re headed. We start with the vendors:

Microsoft grows up

The year saw Microsoft CRM add its one millionth user and take Microsoft Online international. With the recession looming over 2009, Microsoft also took the opportunity to target Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand users with a special price promotion. It wasn’t alone either. Obviously sensing that price was a competitive differentiator, Microsoft and SugarCRM both took steps to make CRM cheaper, simpler and cloudier.

SAP heads for the clouds

Meanwhile, SAP’s roadmap took a familiar turn. The applications heavyweight announced plans to not only roll out its full SaaS-based business suite Business ByDesign to full production, but to add multiple business applications on-demand including sales automation, travel and expense and services management. However, for all its commitment to on-demand, SAP had very little to say about its existing on-demand CRM product. Neither did anyone else.

It may not matter. Some customers are obviously happy with SAP’s existing CRM applications. Coca-Cola is using SAP CRM to roll out the ordering system for its new beverage dispenser.

 Oracle straightens out its CRM roadmap

Oracle, tied up for years bringing together the spoils of its acquisition spree under the Fusion Applications umbrella, made some headway in 2009, announcing that the first set of Fusion Applications will be released this year, including sales and marketing modules. Oracle’s CRM roadmap includes a heavy dose of social CRM as well as long-awaited features such as running Siebel in Outlook. Paul Greenberg shared his take on the CRM roadmap and Siemens seemed to be happy with Oracle’s CRM direction. Siemens dumped a number of SAP projects in hopes of standardizing its CRM systems on Oracle.

Salesforce makes a platform push

 Cisco for a contact center in the cloud and pushing its Service Cloud, which features Twitter integration. CEO Marc Benioff spared no expense on marketing it, buying up a huge booth and staging a presentation at Oracle’s own conference.

But it wasn’t all just about the vendors.

“Cloud” gets a little cloudier

Confused about the difference between hosted, on-demand, SaaS and cloud applications? Direct your frustration to the man cited above (who is now calling Salesforce.com a “cloud company”). But it’s not just Benioff. Sage and Consona announced plans this year that will add a little more to the cloud CRM confusion. With the emergence of offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and others, it’s now possible to own the software but rent the infrastructure. It’s only getting more complicated.

Users test out their social CRM strategies

Clearly, the term of the year goes to “Social CRM,” thanks largely to the vendor and analyst community (more below) that have helped push the term beyond the early, simpler days when it was called CRM and Web 2.0 or social networks. For all the hype and confusion, 2009 marked a year when businesses started listening and formulating a strategy around social CRM. For example, Xerox embarked on a social media monitoring program and JellyVision Labs has begun leveraging social networks to help it sales force. SearchCRM.com also managed to add a couple columnists to help readers sort through the noise. Allen Bonde has been writing about social CRM from the marketing perspective while Paul Greenberg is tackling real world examples of social CRM and the strategy behind them.

CRM software sellers get social medicine

If 2009 was a year in which businesses began experimenting with social CRM, it was also the year the vendors in the market jumped in with both feet. RightNow bought HiveLive to round out its social offering, NetSuite partnered with InsideView to get social with its CRM and ERP suite. Salesforce.com, not only added integration to social networks via the Service Cloud, it promised to deliver a collaboration platform with Chatter. Again, SearchCRM.com turned to Paul Greenberg who compared several of the emerging social CRM products.

And the No. 1 CRM story of 2009?

Remember “doing more with less,” that trite little term that meant management still wanted you to work as hard, get as much accomplished, and bring in as much revenue, only with less resources? Well that had CRM practitioners focused on…

Saving money

There was no shortage of advice on how to save. Gartner offered both five low cost contact center infrastructure projects and five low-cost CRM strategies. Forrester suggested ways to mine more value from existing CRM implementations while others started to see CRM outsourcing as more attractive. Marketing got in on the action as well. Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal suggested the recession could reshape MRM and marketing while Gartner suggested now might be a good time to buy MRM.

Others may argue there were bigger stories or more important developments (and we welcome that feedback), but from our perspective that was the best of 2009. Here’s hoping 2010 is a little easier and a lot more profitable.

NetSuite adds social ERP to social CRM, what’s in store for the market

CRM platforms continue to get more “social” with NetSuite being the latest to integrate social media monitoring into its CRM product.

The past year has seen a wave of integration and innovation with social networking sites and CRM platforms. NetSuite jumping on the bandwagon is nothing new.

NetSuite has teamed with InsideView to integrate InsideView’s social media monitoring into the NetSuite platform. Again, not really new. InsideView already has a similar application on Salesforce.com’s Continued »

What does Google Wave mean for CRM?

Invitations to Google Wave, the search giant’s collaboration platform, went out this week.

No, I didn’t get one.

Yes, I signed up for one.

No, I don’t take it personally.

The Twittersphere, the Blogosphere and all those places where gadget-heads meet up to discuss the latest “revolutionary” product is already abuzz about Wave.

So, how does that affect CRM?

Well, Salesforce.com, never a company to hesitate to latch onto emerging technologies, is already prepared to ride the wave (and yes, I promise I will never use that term again).

It issued a demo of a prototype showing how a company could leverage Google Wave with its customer service team.

So, maybe you run a forward-thinking contact center that has evolved past simple phone and IVR communications and now utilize chat and self service and maybe you’ve even found a way to involve social networks, internal and external. But it looks like you may have one more technology and business process to master.

Don’t get me wrong — Google Wave could very well be a very good thing and may, in fact, “revolutionize” how customer service agents interact with your customers. Our friends over at Unified Communications Nation, after all, are calling it Unified Communications gone wild and most people still haven’t wrapped their heads around unified communications in the contact center.

However, it is an example of how quickly companies like Saleforce.com and Google are changing things and how fast companies need to adapt.

I’m curious if that makes you excited or nervous? Or both?

By the way, SAP hasn’t stayed in the background, it’s just that its contribution focuses on collaborative business process modeling, not CRM.

Here’s a list of the extensions and prototypes for Google Wave.

Are customer communities really all that helpful?

I’m attending the Gartner CRM Summit here in Scottsdale, Ariz. this week and Michael Maoz opened up the show with a pretty compelling keynote laying out how the way businesses interact with their customers is evolving, how organizations need to adapt as we come out of a global recession and how Gartner will address it all in the coming days.

A few of Maoz’s statements stood out, particularly in light of recent announcements from RightNow and Continued »

Natalie Petouhoff and five strategies for social media customer service

While many corporate social media initiatives have focused on marketing and public relations some companies have begun to use social networks and communities as a customer service channel.

Natalie Petouhoff, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, recently authored a report outlining five strategies to achieve customer service excellence with social media. Petouhoff interviewed a number of organizations, including Comcast and iRobot, to learn best practices and pitfalls to avoid with social media initiatives.

In this 15-minute podcast, she details some of her research and conclusions and outlines the five pest practices for customer service excellence with social media.

For more on social media and customer service:

Read Natalie Petouhoff’s blog entry on the five strategies for customer service and social media

See her case studies on Lenovo’s social media customer service and Sage Software’s initiative

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

CRM quotes of note

Summer tends to be a bit slow in the news business when it comes to the CRM market, which gives me a bit of time to catch up on my reading, both CRM and otherwise.

In addition to thoroughly enjoying Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I also liked a few select passages from the blogosphere.

They’re listed below. Enjoy. I’m also open to suggestions for a new book to finish out the summer.

If I were asked for a list of things I wanted to believe in, but had to admit were pure fantasy, the top three would be Santa Claus, world peace, and the “360 degree view of the customer.”

 From Ragsdale’s Eye on Service by John Ragsdale

It’s official.  The brand marketeers have gone totally off the twist.  Call the men in white coats.

From The Sales Machine by Geoffrey James

Apparently while I was commenting on Tom Siebel’s recent comments about the maturity of the tech industry, he was recovering from an attack in the Serengeti by a 12,000 pound elephant.

From Deal Architect by Vinnie Mirchandani

Microsoft says it will have the definitive virtualized public/private/platform cloud solution ready to go in a “shrink wrap” package by 2010, and that, by the way, hosters that aren’t fully virtualized will go the way of the dodo. Of course, this may come as a surprise to all the hosters already going great guns with any variety of managed, virtualized and dedicated offerings, including cloud computing models.

From The Troposphere by Carl Brooks

Would you recommend Twitter be part of any CRM system after hundreds of pages of their documents ended up on TechCrunch?  Would you trust Twitter with just one of your credit cards, stored either on their internal servers or in the cloud right now?  Be honest. 

How about your customer data stored as Tweets on your sales cycles, or your sales reporting, even in the form of confidential Tweets only behind your firewall on an Intranet-based Twitter platform, even on internal servers?

From The Perfect Customer Experience by Louis Columbus

Social-ized CRM

If you live somewhere in the United States there’s a pretty good chance a member of Congress has been in your area holding a town hall meeting.

And there’s a pretty good chance you heard someone screaming that President Obama’s plan for national health insurance was “Socialism” or “Socialized medicine.” One woman, went so far as to say “I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country.”

What you, and they, might have missed is that this is already happening in CRM….well, the “social” part anyway.

Continued »

CRM videos: Glengary Glen Ross, the social customer and ball tossers

“Put the coffee down.”

I always loved that line, and that movie. I’m a fan of David Mamet’s in fact. So, when I came across a YouTube video the other day by Wallstrip spoofing the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengary Glen Ross, I thought it was worth passing along.

The video’s been around for a while, as have the others I’ve embedded here, but they’re definitely entertaining.

In fact, anyone involved with CRM 2.0 or curious about it has probably seen the advertiser/consumer bit from Microsoft Digital Advertising. It definitely makes its point, as does the SAP ball throwers.

Enjoy. Continued »