The changing face of CRM - What is Operational CRM?
I was asked to write a piece on Operational CRM. “What do you mean”, I said. “You know – the fact that customer information is spread across many systems within an organisation and therefore Operational CRM has become more of a concept than a piece of software.” “OK”, I said, “but that’s a tough one! I’ll have to tell a story.”
The Dawn of CRM
Once upon a time Contact Managers and Sales Force Automation met up and decided to get married. And CRM was born. However it didn’t stop there. Campaign Manager was added to the familiy to bring all the marketing people into the fold and Cases (or Tickets) were added to embrace all aspects of customer service and support. Along comes reporting and export to Excel and “hey presto” CRM has come of age. It’s all grown up and sophisticated.
Now CRM has to survive in the grown up world of commerce, financial services, manufacturing and the professions; and CRM realises that it needs partners to survive and thrive. So CRM teams up with email, with email marketing, with events management and with smartphones. It teams up with web site data capture, with back office integration, with business alerts and workflow. Now every way that we deal our clients and our prospects is covered by CRM. All touch points are brought together under the umbrella of Operational CRM – albeit the data is blitzed across many pieces of software and across many functions within the business. Every go-to-market push is captured in CRM and we can measure what we do. Problem solved.
Blogging and Social Media
But along comes blogging and social media ... and the all-encompassing concept of Operational CRM is compromised. Compromised? How? Well – the arrival of blogs and social media into the business world means that prospects and customers can now talk to you without going anywhere near your Operational CRM world. They can engage your staff in tweets, they can comment on your blogs, they can research what you do without going to your web site. Vital interaction with the very people you want to do business with is lost into systems which are not touched by the world of Operational CRM.
Now the continually changing face of CRM has to change once more. It has to stand up to the challenge of the way people buy in the modern age. It has to keep doing the outbound marketing, selling and support stuff it’s been doing for years – and it has to embrace the emerging world of “Inbound Marketing”.
Watch this space as CRM takes another step in its evolution over the coming months. Inbound Marketing is the new kid on the block and CRM is about to start another courtship!
Alan Joenn is Marketing Director at Collier Pickard.
