What does the future hold for CRM,
and for the Forgotten Space of CS&S (Customer Service and Support)?
Will the customer be better served? Will the customer-facing agent be
better empowered? Let’s look at some of the forces at work.
CRM
is on the rise in enterprise budgets, but for the most part only as it
changes; enterprises are demanding and creating their own modified
applications for their existing installs, and vendors themselves are
changing.
”’Service-oriented architecture is becoming a big deal
to the vendors,’ Nelson said. ‘The problem is, they’re devoting so much
time to architectures, they’re not developing new CRM functionality.'” – Gartner: Enterprise CRM returns
The major CRM vendors
are digesting both the changing requirements coming from their
customers and the onrush of micro-competitive new offerings in the
markets (such as SaaS). So now the enterprise itself is cobbling
together changes in-house in an attempt to refine the experience of its
own customers. This is being aided from several quarters, not
necessarily just from the large-scale CRM vendor.
“The customer experience will be the defining characteristic of 2007 corporate strategy and the old CRM
formulation of People-Process-Technology will be replaced by a focus
around mapping customer interactions and providing the tools to enhance
the customer’s experience with the company.
“What this means is that user generated content,
experiential marketing, experiences as commodities and business as an
aggregator of experiences that include products and services – among
other things – will be more than just experimental but will break into
the mainstream of both mindshare and market share.” – 2007; CRM 2.0 Gets Going
SOA is the big paradigm
change that signals more flexibility in market offerings and IT
departments, with the emergence of what we’ve called “democratic
software”. The formidable rise in adoption of SOA (Service
Oriented Architecture) as a successful design philosophy foreshadows
its reign as the totally dominant paradigm within two to three years.
“Over 40% of developers working on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can now complete a typical SOA development effort within 3 months … over 60% of all SOA projects are completed within just 6 months … developers and IT professionals embrace Microsoft’s .NET and Java for SOA
in almost equal proportions … Over the last two years, the total number
of companies with more than 40 Web Services in production has doubled
and that number is expected to double once again in the next twelve
months.” – AJAX Used on Half Of SOA and Web Services Projects
“As retailers gear up for a busy holiday season,
they’ll need to better align technology with business processes to
radically improve the way they manage product inventories and deliver
service to shoppers.” – Sun Helps Retailers Manage Busy Holiday Season With Secure SOA
SOA is working, but
developers are still learning how to employ it. Best and worst
practices are surfacing and soon we’ll be looking at some of these and
their implications.
