Social CRM is all of the buzz right now, but an equal opportunity for CRM lies in the merging of two recent technology trends, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and cloud computing. While numerous success stories exist for both SOA and cloud computing, no one has taken the concepts and realized them to their fullest potential in the realm of CRM. The key ingredient that is missing in most SOA and cloud computing CRM implementations is flexibility.
As much as CRM processes are easily defined, very few companies end up using out-of-the-box functionality for any CRM without customizations. Usually, this takes the form of add-ons (Salesforce.com has done a good job in this regard with its Force platform) or custom programming. Yet neither of these solutions is complete or ideal. Add-ons are still rather rigid in their function, and don’t offer the end user the flexibility to tailor the software to their workflow processes and unique data elements. Custom programming and integration, while often achieving the goal of implementing a company’s process into the software, is often cost-prohibitive and introduces risk of future compatibility.
The answer lies in a metadata-based CRM platform, building on the strengths of SOA and utilizing a cloud infrastructure to deliver CRM services to customers that can be easily customized and are flexible enough for the end user. Such a platform would allow a user to take out-of-the-box CRM functionality and modify it to their heart’s content, integrating it to legacy systems across the enterprise and drawing on data from multiple stores. The end game should be a user platform that offers out-of-the-box functionality, but allows an end-user to customize it to their heart’s content. Programmers should only need to be engaged for real complex business logic requirements that go well beyond the norm. A configurable PaaS (platform as a service) CRM solution will lower the cost of CRM, allow for flexibility and scalability in growth and changing of processes, and allow businesses to focus on what they do best, without having to worry about fitting their process into a canned CRM package.
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