Michael MaozSoftware as a Service in the CRM arena is still used for the easy stuff 90 percent of the time: account set up, customer information, definition of opportunity, sales lead and pipeline management. The really hard stuff remains on premise: helpdesk, field service, technical support, process-intensive contact centers (examples: consumer retail banking, telecommunications, insurance). These need to be up and running 100 percent of the time. Changing these systems tends to be difficult because there are so many industry-specific custom workflows.
We are focusing research on creating checklists that will help guide decisions towards SaaS versus on-premise solutions. Cloud computing standards will continue to improve, and with these improvements we expect to see the support of more complex processes such as business rules for service level agreements. The cost of integration will fall so that ties to Sharepoint, Outlook, analytical tools and data cleansing tools will be more flexible.
To date, many of our clients are reporting paying too high a premium to the SaaS vendor for building out industry-specific CRM functionality and workflows.
We are in the third inning of a nine inning game when it comes to SaaS maturity, and the early adopters are tight lipped about the shortcomings in their chosen system. It’s not easy being a pioneer, but it is their efforts that are driving the improvements in SaaS CRM offerings. Stay tuned.
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