Going beyond sales force, marketing and customer care

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is no longer merely about improving the productivity of your sales force and efficiency of your marketing and customer care. Brian Halpin, general manager of Sage's international CRM centre in Dublin, Ireland, recently visited its local subsidiary, Softline, for a Softline ACCPAC customer event. He compared notes with the local team about international trends; seeing what customers really want from their CRM applications. CRM is proving to be one of the most dynamic concepts driving business today. As such, it's evolved from a mere application into a methodology and philosophy - driving how companies do business. This can be seen in the core trends driving developments in the realm of CRM today both internationally and in South Africa.

Whereas CRM was previously considered to be all about a company's sales force, marketing and customer care, what we're seeing today especially in the European, Australian and South African markets is that it's rather about managing business from an end-to-end perspective. Companies are realising the inherent value of the assets they already have, and starting to harness this value through CRM. This means CRM has evolved into a means of using your financial systems to find out more about your customers: empowering your front office using your back office, and adapting your business accordingly.

The second trend influencing CRM very significantly is that of increased customer involvement. The Web has made it possible for customers to become more "active contributors" in companies: querying issues, tracking delivery of orders and so forth. Building this type of relationship is critical in driving loyalty, which in turn creates distinct competitive advantage. CRM is thus enabling companies to literally extend themselves in terms of reaching their customers.

When it comes to actual product growth and uptake, we're seeing far more adoption of CRM in the low to mid-end of the market as applications become more affordable. This is definitely driving developments in the product space. Applications are now much easier to use, and the implementation thereof quicker than ever before. Smaller enterprises are thus sustaining growth of core CRM products, as well as bolstering that of on-demand applications in this space. We anticipate SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) type applications to continue growing as a result.

Two other trends worth noting no matter the business you are in are those of Business Intelligence (BI) and mobility. Business Intelligence is being recognised more and more as a distinct "product flavour" of CRM; delivering extremely strategic information to marketing and sales, and enabling new levels of planning in business. We thus expect far more uptake in this space in the years to come.

As for mobility, this is impacting on CRM in two main ways: keeping sales and support staff on the road connected to the customer data they need to be the most effective they can be; and connecting remote branches to head office. CRM is thus giving staff access to critical real-time information no matter their location thanks to mobile and handheld devices.

With so many trends making such a positive impact on both CRM applications and business operations and mindset, it's a very exciting time to be in business. Using CRM to interact with and manage customers and clients better enables out-of-the-box thinking; creates customer loyalty; and drives strategic, profitable, performance-based business. Who would have thought so much could be contained in a three letter acronym?