Having been around during the first aggressive attempt by vendors to position CRM within the business/technology roadmap without truly understanding it’s role and then the second more damaging round where companies suddenly developed a massive appetite for this thing called CRM – they knew they wanted one but couldn’t define what ‘one’ was or why they needed it, however miraculously still managed to justify and coerce significant dollars, pounds, yen etc from their CFO’s and even appoint implementation partners to help with the realisation of their unquantifiable ‘dream’.
Not surprisingly the majority of projects failed, the vision got tarnished and the vendors/ISV’s went away with slightly burnt fingers and cupboards full of marketing collateral to rethink their propositions.
A few successes were achieved however and more often than not it was due to these CRM projects having less to do with the ‘C’ and more to do with the business process and other items that surrounded the customer.
Vendors picked up on this principle and have begun touting a different approach to implementing their software and many clients have rethought their vision and focussed their attention on the top and tailing of their customers with the business processes and areas that are core to their position of customer centricity.
The result of this is a groundswell of momentum for the application of the core building blocks of CRM – managing the lifecycle of something, the relationship of that something with other things, and the activities that happen to each of these things along the way.
Slightly less emphasis in managing the C and more on the X’s that make a business unique and provide them with strategic competitive advantage (one of these x’s is still a c!).
Hence xRM.
A few vendors have attempted to tag this term as extensible relationship management, extendable relationship management etc etc and are probably madly trying to copyright it at the moment. However in a non Simon Cowell kind of way my interpretation is that it is the X-factor that makes a business work, or differentiates it from the pack.
These posts are an attempt to wrap some logic around this approach and share the experiences I have had, am currently having and will no doubt encounter with my clients and projects in this evolving arena. I sit on the fence between business and technology so may well nerd it up on a few things that are IMHO cool or particularly useful.
Knowing myself there will also no doubt be the more than occasional tangent, general rants (not always rational ones) and a completely unrelated topic or two…
