What is CRM – and what should it be?

November 12th, 2010 | by ViaDataWebAdmin |

What is CRM really?  Customer Relationship Management should be about managing our relationships with our customers. Simple! It should be focused mainly on the information we need to manage these relationships. What it has become is the latest buzz word for providing mountains of functionality that few businesses really need.

Much like smart phones offer some very useful features but tend to be only used to a small portion of their capacity by most users, CRM software today often goes way beyond the needs of the average business. Sure, this software unlocks new business opportunities and practices for the business able to commit the time and resources to exploit them – but for the majority, the simple task of keeping track of their leads, customers, marketing activities and interactions is only a fraction of what the software can deliver. Yet it is this information that usually is very specific to the business involved and when the powerful CRM tool cannot meet the simple business requirement the business owner is faced with two options; change their business or spend time and money having the software changed to meet the need – neither is very attractive.

Is this progress? Is this IT responding to the needs of the business community? Or is this an IT community delivering technology for it’s own sake?

Craig Byren, MD, ViaData