According to the 2008 Executive Survey by Gartner and Forbes.com, retaining and enhancing relationships with current customers is the number one business issue, followed by attracting new customers. This makes CRM a top priority for many companies. CRM is foremost a business strategy that drives the reengineering of customer processes to improve the customer experience and increase revenue and profitability for the company. However, when it comes to technology, there is no one solution - but more than 50 submarkets, technologies and applications. Our recently released CRM Hype Cycles provides insight into these technologies, including definition, hype and maturity level, business impact, user advice and sample vendors. We break these technologies into five major areas: sales, markteing, customer service, e-commerce and analytics.

The "Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2008" is designed to aid enterprises in surveying the sales automation landscape to understand the maturity, progress and rate of adoption of leading technologies, applications and delivery models. Decision makers should use this framework to investigate the attractiveness and suitability of sales technology solutions in enabling sales strategies to advance revenue growth and margin expansion.

Many applications and technologies are available to support marketing; however, the levels of maturity and market adoption vary dramatically among them. Organizations should use the "Hype Cycle for CRM Marketing Applications, 2008" to determine the maturity and adoption levels of different marketing applications, and to align their corporate investments, based on corporate philosophies regarding innovation, company type, anticipated business benefits and willingness to assume vendor risk.

The "Hype Cycle for CRM Customer Service and Field Service, 2008" describes the impact of new consumer expectations for consistent service across multiple channels, including telephone, face-to-face and Internet-based customer service. Gartner is seeing progress from small and innovative software providers in support of processes that affect the costs of providing service and the overall customer experience. Analytics is playing an increasingly important role in customer service.

The "Hype Cycle for E-Commerce, 2008" illustrates the varying hype and maturity levels of e-commerce technologies, as well as their business dynamics and complexities. Organizations that want to evolve their e-commerce capabilities into next-generation customer experiences and increase sales and customer retention should use this Hype Cycle to understand the hype, technology maturity and business impact of leading e-commerce technologies.

Analytical capability is increasingly packaged as a solution to address specific business issues, instead of being created with generic business intelligence tools. Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Analytic Applications, 2008" shows the maturity, adoption rates and benefits of different analytical applications, including those that support CRM. Many of these capabilities are also featured on our sales, marketing, customer service and e-commerce Hype Cycles.

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Retaining customers is always a challenge, espically in the small/mid size business arena. Companies who obviously do better when they regconize the problem and actively try to fix the problem.

Too often, companies see CRM as a panacea without first understanding their own processes and internal issues. When the project fails, folks point to CRM and claim they were sucked in to the hype.

This is nothing new though. The same could be said for MRP/ERP, various quality improvement initiatives (6 Sigma, TQM, ...) and so on. The fact is that there is a right way and a wrong way to deploy tools and process changes - too often something looks good in a Powerpoint but fails to deliver - many reasons why this happens.

One of the partners in the agency where I work likes to talk about shared values and relationships and strangely (or not) that fits right in with this conversation. Any application, CRMs included, needs to consider not only the people who are going to use it but also how that software supports the values of the organization and the people who interact with it. Using technology to solve a problem is fantastic, after all it is what I do, unfortunately it is often hard to get people to understand that technology without that merging of technology and values will often not be successful in the long run.

Ideally CRM should enhance the customer experience, strengthen the relationship with customer and provide insights and act as a decision support system. But in reality how many CRM implementations are achieving this end objective? Is it that the CRM strategy is wrong or is it not being percolated to the next level while implementing? In such a case, CRM system is just a data entry system capturing customer information and interaction details or to an extent automated application for increasing operational efficiency. Though there are several papers, articles published on this, still there is not much progress implementing CRM effectively, where is the problem and who should guide the CRM implementation?

not sure that the strategy of only recommending large systems solutions for CRM makes much sense. I think that the best way - for sure - is to build your own. Lower cost. Speed to market. Lower cost.

From a gatner perspective, I guess, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks pretty much like a nail.

http://uwecrm.blogspot.com/...