"CRM at Oracle seems to remain their star application, probably because it is, in 2009, the fastest growing application suite at Oracle and probably will be the Oracle revenue leader this year. That's because they've understood what businesses need when it comes to being successful with customers. Note that I didn't say collaborating with customers. That's not what Oracle CRM is all about. They are really applications for sales and marketing effectiveness. ...
But what Anthony Lye, Mark Woolen, Christine Viera, Melissa Boxer and Adam May showed at an executive briefing yesterday on the advances in CRM was heartening because they are molding their CRM applications -- traditional ones -- with social and collaborative features that make them infinitely more valuable. ... Anthony's contention was that there were two types of relationships that CRM users needed to know when it came to customers. First, the explicit relationships -- what kinds of communities was the customer associated with; who were his or her friends or friends of friends; the historic transactional data about the cutomer and the more contemporary profile data. But most interesting to me at least was his idea of the implicit relationships. These were not of the 'who do you know' variety, but more of the 'who do you look like?'"
– Paul Greenberg, ZDNet blog - Social CRM: The Conversation, "Oracle OpenWorld 2009 - Social CRM Technology Rears an Actual Head"
Antony Ly once asked me "If you win who looses?" Fascinating question. If his SCRM strategy wins, the customer would be the looser. How can a customer be happy if all he is, is represented as a sentiment trend in 10% of the distilled conversations, as Ly pointed out at Oracle World? No - sCRM is not the answer to the increasing demand for dialog from the customer side. The business process automation freaks who's goal was a "Zero touch sales model" eventually lost their battle. And sCRM is no better.
If we trust that 60-80% of the so called educated purchase decisions are based on recommendations, businesses need to find ways to be recommended. Bolting on "social" to an otherwise internally managed and administrated CRM system will not make even the slightest difference. Whether this is Oracle or Siebel or SAP - even Salesforce,.com for that matter.
Like Bob Thompson (Customer Think) predicted: A new era will have a new set of tools to conquer the new challenges.
Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS
Post new comment