Welcome back to the CRM Products and Technology blog. My name is Tim Hines and I am the author, moderator, and caretaker of this blog. In this post, we will be discussing a question that has plagued an entire industry for almost as long as the term that describes it was first coined in the early 1990s.
 
What is CRM? 
 
Well, it's not a four letter word, contrary to what many believe. It's something that companies have spent millions of dollars and later compared it to burning the cash.  It's something that hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors claim to provide - if you would just purchase their magical product! It's something that consulting companies sell thousands of hours per of year helping companies (try) to implement. It's something that most analysts believe more than $16 billion a year is spent on. 
 
It's one of those words that has multiple meanings and is used in different contexts, depending on the situation, which is why it is so difficult to define. But for something that is so large, so vast, and so expensive, it's hard to believe that there isn't any singular agreement on what the definition of CRM actually is - at least by those who claim to be seeking, using, consulting, selling or implementing it.
 
I have been in CRM in some sort or fashion for my entire career (as a seeker, user, and consultant, as well as selling, developing and implementing it), and would like to offer the following as a working definition from which we can explore the topic over the next few weeks. It comes right from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management).
 
"Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term applied to processes implemented by a company to handle its contact with its customers. CRM software is used to support these processes, storing information on current and prospective customers."
 
I think this is the cleanest and easiest way to explain what we commonly call CRM.
 
The history and background behind this definition comes from a movement spurred by the invention of technology in the early 1990s called CRM. Before CRM, there was case management, contact management and sales forecasting applications. CRM aspires to bring these discrete sets of information and processes together so that a company can benefit from being able to holistically understand its customers. This benefit is commonly called the "360-degree view." The 360-degree view aims to help companies coordinate internal processes and share information across departmental or divisional lines, as well as market to both prospects and customers based on the centralized, collected history.
 
The reality of this effort was that it was difficult to do with most of the technological infrastructure available for data and application integration at the time. Integration with legacy systems and data issues with customer record master rendered this a very costly and custom effort for most organizations. Also, many organizations were not really ready or willing to coordinate these disparate operations, departments and divisions – let alone share information. 

Fast forward to today with advancements in integration practices and technologies, coupled with the adoption of CRM software in general, and the 360-degree view is actually much more achievable.
 
As traditional CRM vendors focused on solving the 360-degree view problem, what emerged in the late 1990s are what we call specialty solutions. Specialty solutions can be characterized as solutions that augment a core CRM system by adding additional functionality and capability necessary for front-end operations. Specialty solutions come in all three flavors, including marketing, sales and customer service and support. In the sales area, CQP (configure, price, and quote) applications have emerged. In customer service and support, CIM (customer interaction management) applications have been developed to address the consolidation and coordination of customer interactions through any channel, such as e-mail, chat, VoIP, fax, etc. These specialty solutions are now necessary for most companies, particularly as the acceptance of conducting business through the internet has become more and more mainstream.
 
Today, the companies that chose to go on the oftentimes bumpy CRM ride are looking to see a bigger return on their investments. In response, the CRM industry has coined several new buzz phrases that are all the rage. These new phrases are Customer Experience Management and Social CRM. We will talk about these items in coming weeks, but for now, let's isolate them by defining them as a new set of internet related technologies and practices designed to enable a company to open up a more comprehensive dialog with its customers and control and leverage the social community that has emerged around a company and its products/services. To compare and contrast, originally CRM investment was a very internal facing endeavor that mostly sought to unify customer data and automate internal processes, where Social CRM and Customer Experience Management are turning the attention to external prospects and customers through emerging internet related computing paradigms.
 
Next week we will dive into the idea of CRM software and specialty solutions and discuss how they are generally available today in the marketplace.