Long’s post about
talking to customers sparked my interest due to my current thesis work surrounding
CRM packages. It raises a very interesting question, and that is do these companies
genuinely not care or are they not capable of caring?
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A company can only ‘appear’ to be capable of caring if it has invested in systems |
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All this work is useless however without the implementation phase. Big companies for
many years have invested heavily (millions of $) in packages from SAP and Oracle.
It is only now that small and medium enterprises (SME’s) are investing in this area.
This shift has mainly occurred due to 2 things, an increase in customer service quality
expectations and a decrease in the implementation cost of CRM software.
To give you an idea of what CRM software is capable of I would suggest watching this
demo video. It is tucked away on the Microsoft
Dynamics website, but it gives an excellent overview of how a CRM system works.
Microsoft and a number of other providers are making a large scale push into the smaller
end of the market. By smaller I definitely mean employee numbers, not value. In Australia
the SME market actually represents 92% of businesses and 80% of total business value.
As far as developing areas of IT go this is a huge one, and it brings with it a whole
load of business analyst, software customisation/integration and many other job opportunities
with it.
The exciting part for me however is not that I will have a career path, but that IT
is being recognised as a business driver and competitive advantage rather than a necessarily
evil to support a business. The TLA’s
of CRM, SFA, ERP and
logistics areas are leading the way in this area. One day will the CIO always
have a seat at the board table? Will IT staff be recognised and valued as revenue
generators and as holders of crucial business knowledge? Sooner or later, time will
tell.
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