Exactly what is good about these systems again?

I’m optimistic about the final product, but my project timeline was a joke and SAP’s sales reps were total jokes. We experienced similar software load times…45 days I think. Call me a sucker, we actually had two demos because the first guy botched it so bad. The second doofus showed up with an “Easy Button” from Staples or Office Depot or whatever in an attempt to be cute. I’d like to do something with that thing I can’t repeat here… He made lots of promises about what SAP CRM could do for my business, but by the time I realized it was all a farce the deal was done.

I am extremely sensitive to my customers and our outbound reps build relationships the old-fashioned way so true CRM was my hope. To be honest, I don’t even really have SFA at this point.

In general, CRM’s Interaction Center is a navigation nightmare for the end-user and the marketing piece offers all kinds of segmentation, but did you know you can’t sort customer lists by anything other than alphabet or customer number? Want to call customers with the highest household income first? Sounds like a reasonable marketing attack plan, right? Forget it. Sure, you can build a nice little group of customers and segment all day long, but try to manipulate the order in which they are called.

SAP claims to have consulted their customers in designing their CRM…must be some of the worst-run businesses on the planet.

Maybe it’s sour grapes, but I want it known that if you believe as I do that user-adoption is key to CRM success, run from SAP CRM.

I loved SAP R/3. It really transformed my business. SAP’s other products are benefiting from the halo effect; however, when you install an application like CRM you find out it really isn’t integrated out-of-the-box. When you have to spend a min. of 30-50 days getting the CRM middleware, which isn’t even the standard SAP XI, to work it isn’t OOTB. As a side note, I still don’t know why cusotmers have to pay for mySAP ERP after having paid maintenance on R/3. Sneaking Netweaver junk into the license doesn’t justify the cost. The conversion costs along with the “engines” are a crime against business.

As for Oracle, their CRM product was poor with the exception of Service Mgt, which is very solid in Depot Repair. PeopleSoft was a smart acquisition not only for its customer base, but also for its expertise in SOA. With the Siebel acquisition, it wasn’t just CRM. Oracle got both the eDocs product and Siebel Analytics along with a CRM product that is tailored to different verticals.

For me, ERP is a push. Even in CPG and Oil & Gas. (It is amazing to discover that many O&G companies are running more of their systems on JDE than SAP.) The differentiator is CRM. When it comes to transforming companies with its applications for CRM, which expands beyond SFA into customer loyalty, Oracle-Siebel has many more customers and consumers. SAP should have purchased Siebel when it had the chance to join the two best-in-class applications.

Finally, SAP has been able to license CRM, but it is amazing that many customers go on to purchase/rent other applications such as Salesforce.com and Oracle-Siebel. The #1 on premise CRM application for SAP customers is Oracle-Siebel while the #1 SaaS application for SAP customers is Salesforce.com.

Totally grok this post. We’ve been evaluating various CRM systems over the past couple months, and yes they are largely designed for customer acquisition vs customer relationship management over a customers purchasing lifetime. Kind of like picking a girl up at a bar vs getting married and raising a family, different gig;-) They are mostly designed to sell to new customers, although most do have a support or service piece included. Although support is generally when things are not going well from the customer. One of the big things your blogs and comments points allude to is that current CRM technologies don’t cover all the channels that we communicate with our customers. For example on a given day I interact with our customers via phone, in person, email, IM, skype calls, phone, online forums, knowledge base aticles and comments, blogs, support emails and trouble ticket systems…and I might have missed some. Basically all these interactions and communications, plus the customers experience with the product and marketing add up to the relationship. How do I capture all that? Designing a system that could wrap all that up into one nice little view would be kick ass. And what about what the customer sees? Do they get any control over this? At best they get some miserable ticket number that does nothing for them:S My 2 cents.

Andre.

PS. You’re comment writing textbox should be bigger:P
PPS. Sorry it took so long to comment.

- agree on the term “CRM.” when I was “a cowboy on bonus for scalps” i.e., software salesman, I used CRM products like Maximizer and ACT!(painful UI) but the contacts I entered were certainly not “customers” but rather prospects. Had they been customers I wouldn’t have needed to talk to them; that’s why we had Account Management- who by the way was using a different system.

- “motherhood and apple strudel” - nice touch on the “strudel”

- Agree that AppExchange (referring now to the app repository) is very interesting. What a great way to extend system functionality at low risk and cost to SFdC. Managed correctly they can build a loyal ecosystem of developers that will not only increase the stickiness of their core product, but evangelize for them as well. Of course they could easily screw it up too; they must resist the temptation to compete with their partners and/or poach partner functionality and incorporate into theirs.

- to the point about automated CRM being impossible without integration - think this is why your seeing SFdC flog their ability to integrate to incumbent, on-premise ERP pretty hard. I’ve been hearing a lot of pitching around the SAP Connector. My sense is you won’t see them moving towards building (organically or thru acquisition) a monolithic CRM/ERP solution, but rather will continue to build an ecosystem of products and partners around CRM (CRM as the nucleus with these complementary products as electrons buzzing around).

- Interesting point on blogging and NetWeaver - another social media example would be with wikis. I exchanged a few emails with some folks at Socialtext recently. They’re helping us develop a competitive intelligence wiki. Now that they released their API, what would be the benefits of maybe integrating that with NetWeaver? I’m not sure, need to think it through, maybe nothing. (Disclaimer: this idea is the furthest thing from official SAP or Socialtext policy/strategy; rather this was some off-the-cuff brainstorming thru email).

- NetWeaver - I think in addition to what was mentioned about integration it’s interesting to think about breaking down monolithic applications into smaller pieces of application logic. Taking these pieces (business and application services) and rebuilding them into composite applications that are more customized (and customizable) to the needs of an industry vertical, a customer or an end user. Hopefully this will allow for the increased flexibility (flexibility at a reasonable cost I think is the real goal) that you rightly claim is a requirement.

Your point re integration and SAP is also key to where we are, taking a step back to better understand our systems and information landscape prior to pinning down our vision as to how to CRM ourselves.

Above all for us in the business we are in, we are looking to ensure we have a joined up and meaningful understanding of people and places in equal measure in relation to how we deliver our services going forward.

And trust me - local authorities are the original mash up but that seems to only further fuel the business case for CRM and SAP as a means of managing the complexities we face.

Scott- you know i greatly respect your opinion, so the praise is greatly appreciated. do you touch ERP in your role at all?

really cote? you have links in that regard, or can you suggest who at BEA to talk to in that regard?

thanks sig- that reminds me i need to post on ventoux trip today

Right on.

That’s a keenly perceptive statement - the tools commonly lumped under CRM seem definitely more around operational optimization behind the scenes, even though they are commonly called the front office tools.

I appreciate your automation and integration comments, but tools in this area IMHO always need to come back to supporting not replacing human contact - think OnStar. Sure there are certain customer interactions that can and should be automated, but I think there is sometimes too much focus on that. CRM/SFA tools should be about retaining customers by enhancing relationships, not replacing them.

BTW - your coverage of SAP has been fantastic, keep it up. I’m done reading trade pubs!