Michael MaozSince I’m on vacation today, I’m going to say it: the forecast for CRM applications: partly Cloud-y. Forget the camp, though, and hear what my clients are struggling with. The line of business responsible for customer experience, customer service, and sales is just looking for the functionality to be successful. They have no intrinsic interest in business suites, on premise, hosting, or Cloud Computing. They have three core interests: 1) a vested interest in lowering the cost of going to market; 2) a deep commitment to creating more loyal customers; and 3) a goal of driving higher revenue.
If we go over to IT, the CIO is obviously not against any of the objectives and goals of the folks in sales, marketing, and service. At the same time, these folks are neither her/his boss nor peers. A lot of times customer service managers (probably the most important role in the entire company) are under operations or sales. That gives them little discretionary budget to innovate.
And here is the rub: for all of the IT innovation, application governance, application consolidation, there is rarely any ROI that is rigorous enough to say: this initiative lifted sales, improved marketing effectiveness, boosted customer loyalty. From that perspective IT seems to be failing. That isn’t to say it IS failing – but without an ability to create a tight and convincing argument that an initiative is helping with the core reason we are in business, there could be trouble down the road.
My closing request to the CIO is to work to elevate sales, marketing and service to your level in decision making, and jointly commit to IT planning and measures of efficacy. The goal of unified enterprise application suites, for example, may be admirable but ineffective. I like the research that shows most of the material in human DNA is junk. I think IT should live with that – maybe to you a lot of what your lines of business ask for or procure to achieve their goals is ‘junk’ to you, but it just might be the way that your company achieves a competitive edge!!!!
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Category: CRM Innovation and Customer Experience SaaS and Cloud Computing Tags: Add new tag
