Imperative for Greater Due Diligence in Customer Engagement
The market has witnessed multiple vendors with various Social CRM solutions without a deep focus on current enterprise CRM investments, social analytics tightly woven to the offering to determine sentiment, influence outside of global business intelligence enterprise tools, absence of impact or creation of new social workflows inside the business, community and content search optimization, category aggregation, tablets, mobility, social connectors, propriety lock-in platforms to strategically navigate, and so on.
Ironically, all the above complexity (and there is much more) can be boiled down to two simple trends we have witnessed:
1. Enterprise CRM operations from earlier waves have remained fairly static or have become fragmented organizationally by channel or unit, leading to the growth of technology, business, and data silos internally and a decrease in enterprise coordination around the end customer needs.
2. The networked customer increasingly influences a larger portion of the business relationship outside of the enterprise and expects the business, in turn, to interact in a unified fashion, without regard to channel or function.
These two trends, while significant, have ignited a firestorm of activity across all vendors, be it software, platforms, tablets, application developer communities, partner collaboration, alliances, and more. Unlike CMO driven Social Media initiatives, the market for Social CRM and associated enterprise CRM intersections is still in nascent stages. Identification of the most suitable solutions, best-in-class practices and the appropriate enterprise hybrid technology mix for organizations to experience a successful Social CRM implementation is greenfield. And for good reasons. Unlike a Social Media COE, Social CRM has much higher implications for enterprise front office operations, involving potentially thousands of internal resources and significant business implications.
There are a few pioneering vendors that have been able to prove their capabilities and are pursuing a 'suite' position in this market. Yet there is a lot of duplication in the functionality, and, more important, none can claim to replace existing enterprise CRM with new social CRM solutions for the existing enterprise CRM sector. Rather, an integration, hub-spoke, division based, or combination of the above is the sales model approach witnessed.
In other words, there is no one vendor that 'does it all', unlike prior 'feature wars' from the earlier CRM era.
The above trends are indeed influencing key client long term investment decisions (or lack thereof, with a preference to postpone). Yet, business leaders navigating their future customer strategies, full due diligence is required now more than ever before to be positioned for execution. Competitors are completing similar efforts as the recognition to change, the highest 'noise to signal' ratio occuring now, shows no sign of abating. Rather indicators are that it will only increase.
Sitting on the sidelines is not an option.
