Oracle, HP and Siegel – picking up the CRuMbs?

1999-09-21

CRM is, frankly, a triumph of marketing over substance. The danger lies ahead for the main players, who may have forgotten to worry about the potential damage they could do to their reputations, let alone those of their customers.

Why so? Let’s clear some cobwebs which may be obscuring the true CRM message. CRM is the blanket term applied to “front office software”, i.e. software which may be used to develop, manage and deal with people with whom a company needs to interact. This definition is dubiously vague, a fact which has been exploited by vendors of anything from sales automation, help desk, marketing and call centre software packages. The war of words is ongoing, as the big players such as Oracle and Siebel slug it out to win market share. Bizarrely, it isn’t the products that are being pitched head to head, it is the marketing messages. As it happens, the word is (from the Yankee Group) that the punch-fest is cutting little ice with the end user, who is making decisions based on what the package offers. This makes sense – we are not talking about a product with reasonably standard interfaces and functionality, but an array of very different products which must be decided on their own merits.

On to the second point. The danger of selling on hype alone is that the substance will most likely disappoint. We would strongly advise anyone from making a decision about a CRM product to define the requirement very carefully before making any decision. This is obvious motherhood, but is worth re-emphasising as CRM product lines have come into existence rather rapidly following a bout of market making from analysts and vendors alike. ERP packages, on the contrary, had a more solid foundation constructed before the marketeers got hold of it (and even then, were not painless to implement). A further worry concerns the quality of the products. In the rush to gain mind share before market share, it is possible that products will be cobbled together using half-suitable components and some window dressing on the user interface. Information has come our way to support this hypothesis: we can only advise decision-makers not to rush into any purchase before both functionality and product quality have been verified as adequate.

After all, we are not just talking about the reputations of the vendors. CRM automates the interface to the customer, so any failures will be starkly visible outside the user organisation. As we are advising against hype, neither do we want to over-hype the risks. All we would say is look before you leap: know what you want and ensure that you will get it, before you sign the CRM bottom line.

(First published 21 September 1999)