CRM: A Consultant's Perspective

From Operational to Analytical to Collaborative CRM ...

Having spent over 10 years in the CRM industry (I can recollect days when CRM meant Siebel and 100+ vendors ) and having consulted over 25 clients across 4 continents and over 10 countries .. i have been fortunate to see the landscape transforming at such a rapid pace ..

The initial lessons in CRM were around customer Acquisition - Marketing and Sales and Customer retention - around service . These 3 areas formed the pillars of CRM courses worldwide and all applications from a technology perspective started to cater to this segments.. This was the first wave of what I call the customer data /information gathering period.

<< I call this phase Operational or Transactional CRM >>

Over a period of time a significant amount of data was collected and it was now the turn of business intelligence firms and even stronger CRM providers to come up with smart and customer intelligence applications. This drove the wave 2 of CRM application consolidation and led to many vendors offering CRM analytics as part of their standard package

<< I call this phase Analytical CRM>>

The last 2 years saw the new wave of web 2.0 and the a concept of CRM 2.0 emerging in parallel . This is attributed to the rise of social networking sites, blogs and how people share and build relationships. This also defined the way some firms related to their customers.

<< this is the beginning of new phase called Collaborative CRM>>

I will continue to expand this concept in my next article.

Happy Customers :-))