Having returned to the world of CRM, like a ball on the end of a piece of elastic, it’s clear to see not much on the face of it has changed. So what does the future of CRM hold?
While some new and exciting technologies have matured over the last 3-4 years, most of the incumbent CRM solutions in use today have, at their core, the same frameworks and technology that’s been in play for the last 20-25 years.
When looking at the fundamentals of customer experience and what it takes to deliver truly differentiating sales or service encounters with outcomes that are really destined to create relationships, many solutions have approached the problem the wrong way.
I’ve been saying for years now that everything a company or an organization does is to serve a customer or citizen.
If you didn’t have someone to buy your product, you wouldn’t build or manufacture anything. If you didn’t sell something, you wouldn’t need to collect money or track it in a financial system. If you don’t need to manufacture anything, then you have no suppliers to pay, or logistics to organize. If you’re not making, producing, accounting, or shipping anything, you don’t need to track your people, skill them, or optimize the workforce. In public sector, whilst you are not manufacturing, you are delivering a service, equally complex, with its own focus on delivering value for the citizens you serve.
For years, CRM has focused on how you manage the front end, how you sell better, maintain the relationship beyond an individual sales agent, how you serve faster, how you automate the capture and response of a customer engagement, how you off-load more of the customer experience itself to the customer. How many processes have you been caught in where you think, “I just want to talk to a person”? Or you feel you’re now an unofficial employee of the company, because you have to scan, bag, and transact your own shopping.
To achieve all of this requires the closest of integrations and the agile streamlining of continuous complete processes, beyond anything we see today across the majority of CRM vendors. While a thin veneer across the top may look beautiful, it’s not going to make a table any more usable. Even more importantly, if it’s missing its legs, it’s simply not a table!
So, fundamentally, a CRM layer, or a workflow layer above your business systems, does not, a customer experience delivery solution, make.
Now you may protest: “This is what you’ve been delivering for years, encouraging us to purchase…” So let me defend myself…
You’re right: this what I have been creating and selling for years. However, when improved sales force processing, automation, or customer service and support systems were required, this was a real necessity at the time. It needed the delivery of a very different style of software compared to the transactional approach used by stock and finance off the shelf solutions of the day. It required more flexibility as to how it could be used and configured, because, whilst accounting practices were standardizing, how someone sold or served a customer was dramatically different, and the DNA of these interactions was very specific. So new types of solutions were designed and created to address this very different set of requirements, even at SAP, and there was not a transaction code in sight. The move from paper card, and in-memory (yes, the non-digital type) customer information had begun.
Over time however, similarities started to become evident across the world of SFA and CSM, a trait that Tom and the team at Siebel recognized, and Scopus Technologies Inc. was acquired and the journey to what CRM is today commenced. At the time, this was the right solution model for the technologies in play.
CRM was specifically designed to manage the engagements across account and service reps, located in your data centers, alongside your critical business systems, with minimal specific integration capabilities introduced (This spawned a whole new set of software technologies and solutions for just the integrations, as we all know).
Many acquisitions continued through the 90’s and 2000’s, and much of the SFA and CSM marketplace consolidated. During the 2000’s though, SAP decided to include some new thinking, and the introduction of the Business Suite brought the “radical” idea of pre-built, deep connected processes across its Enterprise Resource Planning solutions for complete execution. It wasn’t just one or two, it was 100’s.
With the addition of SAP Sales Cloud to GROW with SAP, unlocking a seamless lead-to-cash process just got easier for organizations looking to try a modern sales solution – while also paving the way for future, larger scale transformation.
The CRM solution kept its flexibility and independence from the transactional approach of many of the business systems, but now, information could freely flow across the companies’ data center, creating a joined-up world of end-2-end process opportunities and value. The whole approach to CRM though wasn’t without its issues, however. The costs of owning and operating these CRM solutions, was growing more expensive, over configuration caused significant delays in implementations – not to mention the high costs of integration and integration maintenance. Often the costs of CRM solutions were beyond the reach of many SMB companies, seemed over-complex, and more than most needed.
Salesforce saw a market opportunity to redefine how CRM software was delivered, and the world of SaaS sales solutions was created. However, the outcome was that the CRM solution moved away from the finance, resource, and planning systems of record that are critical to delivering the right experiences to the customer and complete processes were broken.
Whilst the cost of the CRM solutions may have reduced relatively, the cost of integrating has increased again – and significantly. On top of that, the ability to deliver streamlined complete processes, has become harder. It’s possible, don’t get me wrong, but with all the challenges and maintenance overhead it generates, ultimately what is its’ value for money?
I’m not saying SaaS isn’t the right approach, but fundamentally believe you cannot design an effective CRM solution for sales or service without understanding the bigger picture of the systems of record. It’s your intelligent enterprise systems that are key to streamlined customer experience delivery.
You need to comprehend how a financial process is impacted by a customer outcome or commitment. If a company really has the resources to engage or supply, they’ll fix the problem, along with hundreds of other real business challenges, all with multiple flavors, by industry. This takes deep domain experience and historical expertise, something that exists at SAP.
When early SaaS CRM started, no-one was thinking about large or mid-market companies and complex end-to-end processes. The priority was simplification of CRM and a reduction in costs. This drove the early cloud technology designs and focus areas targeted at small, simple companies.
Today we see far wider and more complex requirements for these platforms which they were never conceived to support.
The reality is the technologies and design concepts used today by SaaS solutions predominantly are over 20 years old. In fact, they started eight years before the first iPhone was released.
How many of you are still using the first iPhone? I suspect none! So why are we still relying on solutions architected and designed on these older standards and approaches?
Ironically, today we find ourselves again in an environment where the simple CRM solutions have been over configured and engineered, creating performance overhead, increasing costs all at the consequence of hampering agility.
When it comes to the future of CRM, we need more: a better approach, design systems for today’s modern environment and market conditions, and the components and capabilities to support end-to-end process needs and priorities, as well the demands of 24×7, truly global companies.
Agility and flexibility are a priority predicated on low code and no code concepts that facilitate greater business independence from IT. Additionally, the days of mass duplication of data and processes into your front office or workflow solution isn’t optimal, especially when it comes to being able to leverage the full power of modern capabilities like AI.
Looking at the concepts of composability, whilst you can shoe-horn this into legacy solutions, it’s typically at a cost of performance and increases in complexity. To do this well needs a bold approach, something based on reality and modern capabilities, designed from the ground up to exceed not only today’s requirements, but capacity to keep pace with evolving innovations and expectations for the foreseeable future.
Delivering a totally new sales and service environment that takes advantage of new and emerging trends and technologies in the IT industry happens about once every 10-15 years. And SAP has done it again.
Continuing of their legacy of setting of standards across the software industry in the last 50+ years, SAP has recently delivered a totally new, modern sales and service SaaS solution that rivals everything out there today. It’s been designed to take advantage of SAP’s unique differentiating capabilities for comprehensive process excellence through composability and information flow design models, streamlining the ability to orchestrate and deliver efficiently today’s business execution needs.
And just because it’s been built by SAP, that doesn’t mean it will only work effectively in a totally SAP environment. The design patterns created for connected continuous process orchestration can be adapted to work alongside non-SAP solutions, as everyone appreciates and recognizes that most businesses have a heterogenous environment.
The experience of differentiating service delivery or sales interactions starts with the customer needing answers from everywhere, and the intelligence to deliver optimized revenues or resolution.
Design the solution right, build it with a deep understanding of the complexity of needs you want to simplify and support, and then you have a solution designed to excel in today’s modern business environment – and that is precisely what SAP has done.
I was building solutions for handling customer interactions long before the desktop PC became a reality. With every mass innovation in technology, architecture, capability etc., that can really be applied to improve customer experiences, it’s exciting. I’m again incredibly excited at the opportunities available to evolve customer experiences beyond a simple SaaS CRM product with chat, workflows, duplicative data platforms, and disconnected AI.
The future of CRM, required a better way – a way that would harness everything great within today’s cloud technologies, but that doesn’t throw away past value. A way that offers one enterprise environment and seamless cross solution processing that’s simple to achieve and cost effective. And we’ve arrived at that moment.
With SAPs new approach, your business or organization can re-imagine citizen and customer engagement, enabling you to deliver the kind of experiences you might only speak of, but that your customers are expecting from you tomorrow – if not today.
