CRM Gets More Social and Evolves Yet Again.
As in one of our previous posts CRM+PLM+Social Media has formed a new category of enterprise software (http://tinyurl.com/3sdh4wg). The harmonization that these individual software applications have converged features/functions to evolve the CRM space yet again. Another major evolutionary change that is happening within CRM is the influence of mobility. The social aspects of CRM are now needed more than before. Savvy consumers now expect the comfortable level of consumer usability to extend to the enterprise.
The social aspects that mobile introduces with sharing, bookmarking etc. forms a natural extension of CRM functions. The rapid adoption of tablets within the enterprise for varied uses further pushes the CRM market to become mobile and address social etiquette. Mobility and Social media heavily influences the features and functions that are now incorporated within many CRM packages.
The social aspects will have to be carefully monitored as to the effectiveness and limits of the social aspect. Many consumer driven features may not be appropriate for enterprise adoption and may introduce significant security IT risks for support and administration. Organizations will need to adopt social media policies and guidelines to control usage and give them the ability to monitor the enterprise tone of message. See our posts Has Social Media Become Too Social (http://tinyurl.com/3v4vax2) and Social Media Policy and Guidelines (http://tinyurl.com/5wwcgb5).
In our previous posts, mentions how similar features have converged to form new functionality thus creating a new software category. With additional features that extend the CRM such as BI, and Enterprise Marketing Management and Automation, Project Management and billing will be a challenge to take mobile. With the added functionality of content management(PLM), Social, CRM, BI, EMM, PM, Billing and other marketing automation functions are features that are creating this new application. With so many functional features this is starting to look like an ERP for services type of software rather than an extended CRM. Software vendors will have to balance a fine line as to how big their CRM package evolves to and what feature/functions will evolve this to being no longer a CRM type of software. The additional functionalities such as project billing and other marketing automation may stretch organizations to not only confuse them within a software selection process but will also complicate the sales cycle and bottom line of these CRM – based software vendors.
Consequently, consumers may become distressed as a once simple CRM implementation a usually straight-forward type of application for IT and the rest of the organization has suddenly become very complicated because of the extraneous integration and possibly hundreds of new feature/functions. Along the same line of thought organizations must consider CRM and the extra features as part of their enterprise infrastructure strategy as now it entails several different applications and the new administration to administer and support it.
The next evolution in CRM software has taken a tremendous leap forward. These new features and functions will make mobile difficult as there will be too many features and very memory intensive to maintain and execute, which is limited by mobile devices. CRM enterprise software vendors will have fine line to balance the enterprise with applicable consumer driven features that will become usable within the enterprise. Software vendors beware and don’t overstuff your apps that gets away from their core software offering.
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