Michael MaozOracle OpenWorld (http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html) is happening right now. Wednesday through Friday are the big days for CRM practitioners, when the Oracle Customer Experience Summit will get going over at the St. Francis. Oracle also has the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Knowledge Zone for partners working on their systems. The Dynamics CRM User Group (http://www.crmug.com/) is meeting in a couple of weeks – and the customer world will be a lot smarter for it, as will Microsoft. SAP and Salesforce.com both have user groups and forums of their own.
A question begs: with all of the supposed transparency in the market, why do prospects for basic functionality in areas like a customer service desktop in a large, distributed contact center, for example, feel that they confront walls of ambiguity and poor articulation of capability, pricing, project resourcing, industry-capabilities, integration, best practices, ROI-determinations, and (especially) PITFALLS.
It is asking a lot from a vendor or for an integrator to lay bare the ‘gotchas’ that can derail projects or gum up the works in gaining project approval. It is also notoriously hard to discover that anyone before you has ever faced these challenges and failed, or struggled.
Weren’t the ‘new’ world of software and the new world of ‘outside-in’ co-creation and openness have supposed to eliminate or greatly reduce confusion? Judging by client questions over the past 12 months on Social practices for customer service, or on building a new-generation agent desktop with more intelligence and process capability, the answer is no. We are not seeing any greater level of candor or information availability than we were 12 years ago.
The easy stuff is still easy – basic Salesforce automation, for example. The difficult work – around process and technology – is still shrouded in Clouds. Maybe new Clouds, but to much the same end. We are waiting for a new page written by a few of the lead vendors – that could make the difference.
Now you can disagree – and we are betting many will. Do you think there is a new age of transparency in the Social and CRM area?
And if you are at OpenWorld – enjoy the show. Oracle has brought together an amazing array or technology.
Category: Applications CIO Cloud Contact Center CRM Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Sales Force Automation SFA Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Uncategorized Tags:
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1 This Week: A Social CRM Acquisition Frenzy? + Is Your Intranet Social Enough? | CMS News Today October 7, 2012 at 4:40 am
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