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Customer Relationship Management Market Assessment 2006
Key Note Publications Ltd, Aug 2006, Pages: 115
In 2005, there was a resurgence of interest in customer relationship management (CRM), with commentators, as they had in the late 1990s, reiterating that CRM is about more than technology — it is about putting the customer at the heart of the business. However, a new phrase has entered the CRM lexicon — customer experience management (CEM) — in order to describe the strategy, as opposed to the technology that facilitates the execution of the strategy.
This Market Assessment report is concerned with the technology; technology providers have moved on, have been developing their products to embrace the demands of the marketplace. Those demands include: technology that can link the core CRM applications of customer service, sales and marketing with other applications at play in the organisation; technology that can reduce costs; and technology that can be accessed over the Internet.
The largest surge has been towards the technology that can be accessed via the Internet, with pioneers in this field, such as salesforce.com, being joined by other major vendors (such as Siebel and SAP) taking advantage of the wider availability of broadband, with their own online offerings. The terminology has changed in the past few years too, from application service provider (ASP), which referred to systems hosted on vendors' own servers rather than those installed within the client company, to Software as a Service (SaaS), or hosted solutions, which means the same thing.
Hosted solutions are ideal for smaller companies; rather than incurring enormous set-up, installation, training and maintenance costs — as well as having to pay licence fees for each user — they simply pay for access to a system designed for them but hosted elsewhere.
These advances mean that the profile of the marketplace has changed. The distinctions between those offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and those offering CRM applications have blurred, as developers in each field have extended their offerings. With all major vendors also making forays into the hosted arena, the distinctions are continually made less clear.
There are fewer competitors in the market than previously. Barriers to entry are high and, of the plethora of CRM vendors that emerged in the early part of the century, many have either been swallowed up by larger players or have gone into administration.
The market is consolidating: Siebel Systems — for so long the CRM touchstone — was acquired by Oracle early in 2006; other major vendors have also lost their independence to global corporations.
The emergence of new markets — in China especially — is one of the key drivers of the mergers discussed in this report. Consolidation strengthens the market, and merged companies can perform better in a global market.
Another driver in the CRM market is the emergence of Microsoft, with its own solutions aimed very much at smaller companies. Microsoft CRM provides developers with a platform upon which they can build their own branded solutions for their own niche markets, but it also provides small to medium enterprises (SMEs) with the means to improve their own services and compete against larger rivals. In addition, Microsoft works with established CRM and ERP vendors so that CRM applications can interact with Microsoft desktop and office applications, allowing data from CRM applications to be viewed through, for example, Microsoft's Outlook.
Wireless technology has also advanced, affording greater access to CRM systems while users are mobile. Advances in Internet telephony and broadband technology have meant that developers have been able to advance voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) to the point where real cost savings can be made, especially in the call centre.
Early CRM evangelists insisted that CRM was not a passing management fad and that it would change forever the way companies did business. The early adopters provided the testing beds for technology that had not yet reached its potential, but the high cost of implementation did not provide the size of return investors in this technology were looking for. CRM went back to the drawing board and it is still developing. However, it is now clear that the early CRM evangelists were right about the potential of this technology.
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Customer Relationship Management - Introduction
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