Put TechRadar on Your Radar Screen

Bill Band, the head of the CRM practice at Forrester and one of the most senior industry analysts who "gets" it, just finished and released an incredibly comprehensive study called, (take a breath its a long one), " TechRadar for BP&A (that's Business Process and Applications, for the non-cognoscenti) Professionals: The Extended CRM Application Ecosystem, Q3 2009 ." I usually get to say, when there is something this long, the title is longer than the actual report, but in this case...it isn't.

Bill wrote an important piece here, people. Its a first look at an extended CRM ecosystem - one that goes beyond - well beyond - the traditional pillars of CRM - sales, marketing and customer service to a number of other areas. Not only that, it refines the traditional pillars to some extent too - thus building exactly what Bill says here - a CRM ecosystem that is considerably more encompassing than the traditional version of CRM.

Of course, I'm looking at it to see if it dovetails with my perception of the contemporary CRM universe and I'm happy to say it does - for the most part - but not entirely.

What It Is

Arguably, this ist the first attempt that I've seen to organize and identify the extended CRM technology ecosystem that now is needed to serve customers in ways that can actually derive mutually beneficial value. What I mean by that stiff concept is that this is the universe of technology that can be applied so that on the one hand, the individual productivity of the customer-facing and back office is improved and on the other hand, it is the first take on the tools that are basically outreach to the customer so that the customers themselves are engaged with the company. Here's the categories that he identifies:

• Configure, Price & Quote
• Contact Center Infrastructure
• Contract Lifecycle Management
• Customer Business Intelligence
• Customer Community Platforms
• Customer Data Management
• Customer Forums
• Customer Service and Support
• eCommerce
• Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment
• Enterprise Feedback Management
• Enterprise Marketing Management
• Field Service Management
• IVR/Speech Portals
• Order Management
• Partner Relationship Management
• Product Lifecycle Management
• Revenue & Pricing Management
• Salesforce Automation

Here's what it looks like in the organized, extended CRM ecosystem according to Monsieur Band (and thanks to Bill Band for permission to show this figure):

Nicely done. Very nicely done for the most part.

What makes this a critical study is that it is the first attempt that I know of to actually organize the extensive pieces of the CRM systemic technology puzzle that Social CRM calls for. What Bill also does in this document is look at the maturity model for each tech segment, identifies some key vendors in each segment and the evolutionary possibilities for each segment. He also values each segment as low, medium, high for a business. Keep in mind this is not at all the same as the CRM Magazine Social CRM Maturity Model (diagram here and kickoff article here) or my Collaborative Value Chain. This is a granular look at the applications and vendors and areas that need to be considered and the value of each of the areas. Both mine and CRM Magazine's are strategic and bigger picture. Ours are the whole pie - blueberry sounds good to me right now - with a really nice cuppa coffee. Ummmm. Goooood. Really good. Uh. Whoops. Sorry. Anyway, ours are the whole pie, Bill's is a deep dish slice.

I need to stress this. This is primarily the operational side of Social CRM. While there are certainly overlaps into the collaborative, customer engagement piece, it is not the complete view of everything, nor was it meant to be. It is the new, shiny CRM corporate technology map, and easily the best of its kind to date.

Before I get into some of Bill's conclusions, I want to note a few things.

My Thoughts So Far

There are some notable omissions that make this not quite perfect. The most egregious - and this one is particularly important - is that there is no social media monitoring technology included in this 46 page report. Not even a mention. Consequently, because it was missed, there is no text analysis, speech analysis and their big ol' subset, attitudinal or sentiment analytics discussed. While business intelligence is exceptionally well covered, because the conversation is not being monitored, there is no apparent need for analyzing the unstructured data that the conversations provide. What needs to be included to make this extended ecosystem complete are the pieces of technology that provide the capability to monitor customer conversations, engage the customer in a conversation (which is somewhat covered by the inclusion of customer community platforms, customer forums and enterprise feedback management tools.) and capture the unstructured, emotional and attitudinal data (text, speech and sentiment analysis). These technology "categories" are a non-negotiable necessity, I'm sure was nothing more than an oversight since Bill is one of the analysts who understands Social CRM extremely well and has written two other very important reports on it. You can check them out here and here. He calls it CRM 2.0, which is what I used to call it back in the day too. Sigh.

What also is less of an issue but nonetheless has to be taken into account is the changing nature of the pillars of CRM - sales, marketing and customer service. In his discussions for example of customer service and support, while he doesn't discussion web self service or community based customer service, he does indicate that kind of customer service in the community platforms discussion. In marketing he talks a lot about Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) which are the large enterprise super-management marketing applications, but companies like Eloqua at the enterprise level, Marketo and Infusionsoft at the mid to small business level - all marketing automation suites don't get their props because of the particularly narrow focus around marketing. In sales, he does a remarkable job of covering the SFA of today, but the changing nature of SFA has spun off a whole new area - sales effectiveness which, by the way, is pretty much what Oracle Social CRM's sales applications are actually with a notable exception. Sales effectiveness is a category that is rich enough at this point to merit inclusion into this remarkable body of work.

Don't get me wrong. This is a massive, successful effort and one that has been needed for the last year or so. No one has taken this granular a look at the technology landscape for an extended CRM. I know I could never have done this. Bill did.

Bill defined the 19 application categories (applications he called them, which actually confused me at first) as those that "support the business processes for targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding and collaborating with customers. My comments are aimed at filling the gaps that are bound to exist in an effort this large.

Bill's Thinking

Some of the conclusions he came to through the TechRadar research:

• Early adopters are experimenting with social applications such as customer community platforms and enterprise feedback management. He sees a resurgence in customer forums as they morph to combine with collaboration technologies. Even those these are optional in the eyes of businesses - something I wholeheartedly agree with - though I think that building communities that can be internally administered and monitored/managed will be more valuable than just throwing up a Facebook page. Both would be even better. One thing that this report got me thinking about is Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) which at the moment I have no real good or bad feel for. I'm going to investigate the value of this application category and get back to y'all on it.
• Another observation in the report is that the technologies for enabling "the Holy Grail for CRM Professionals....a 360-degree view of customers" are getting more comprehensive and better. I completely agree. Given that only 38 percent of companies claim that they have achieved it - and odds are, that if we investigate those 38 percent, we'll find that there is widely varying view of what 360 degrees means in this case, there is no question that this is a real positive. The only thing is that the Holy 360 is no longer a Holy Grail for CRM. It should be seen as a prerequisite for companies trying to gain insight into their individual customers and some sense of where to go with them. The new Holy Grail is "a company like me" which is not a data record. Its an idealized state of corporate existence where each customer feels that the company knows them and they know the company - as a peer. Is it possible to achieve that state? Highly unlikely. Its something to strive for and aim at with some percent of success - the ROI of that "state" is many customers functioning as advocates on your behalf. But who knows? Dan Brown not withstanding, no one has found the sacred chalice yet either. Doesn't mean it isn't out there.

This is an important document. It shows how CRM technology as we need to map it looks, while we define the new business models, the new processes, the new business rules, and the new cultures that Social CRM demands. With the exclusions included, it would be where I would start from. If I were a company out there, vendor or practitioner, I would pick up a copy of this and keep it on top of my desk as a reference work to aid your thinking on what technologies will provide you with business value and approximately when they will. Mere individual mortals can't afford this but CRM-interested companies can't afford to not have it.

Technorati : Bill Band, CRM, Forrester Group, SCRM, social crm
Del.icio.us : Bill Band, CRM, Forrester Group, SCRM, social crm

Comments

[GoldMine Software]

Hey Paul,

Great post.

I think one of the real values of CRM is to be able to be able to predict behavior before it has happened. In other words to be able to tell by a customer's actions that you are on the verge of losing them and then take whatever corrective actions are necessary as part of your customer retention strategy.

We have been involved with CRM for the last 20 years and so few of our clients actually do this.

[Online CRM]

Hey all...

There are some great solutions out there for businesses. In selecting a solution, you must take into account many options including current needs as well as future needs...

Some other great CRM options are from:

www.Rightnow.Com -- great online and on-premise solutions. Has been in the market for sometime.

www.SuradoCRM.com -- you can start with online and easily migrate to on-premise. Also has a great offline CRM product. One of the early CRM market introductions.

www.SugarCRM.com -- open source... only attempt this option if you are into programming.

www.NetSuite.com -- offers both CRM and ERP integration. May not be suitable for small business since implementation is not exactly easy. But may be a great tool for larger organizations.

[TypePad Support]

Testing comments

[John Cass]

Good review Paul, I find it difficult to believe 38% of companies report complete coverage, though as you suggest closer analysis will reveal what info they are gathering.

[scorpfromhell]

I seem to have missed Bill's report in the frenzy last week! Thanks for the great review Paul. I have now got the report & intend to go through it thoroughly. Theres a lot to learn for me in that from what I can see in the graphic that Bill has consented to your posting it here.

Now in addition to Social Media Monitoring (which IMHO is actually a ruse to get most orgs get started on Social CRM rather than providing much help since I doubt if the analysis gets back into any of the decision making process, but I am agree to stand corrected with real world examples) there is this other oft overlooked aspect, Social Network Analysis. (I too overlook it far too often, including in my social CRM solution landscape: http://bit.ly/18GI3C )

Is this because there is no tool that has graduated from academic to business application? I do not know, but other than KXEN & one another which I genuinely forget, I do not know of any other SNA tool that could integrate with traditional CRM systems to form part of the social CRM IT landscape.

Get well soon Paul. :) We still haven't gotten around to chat in more than a month!

Regards,
Prem ( http://twitter.com/prem_k )