Surfing the Web recently for the latest news about Amy Winehouse, I ran across an article I wrote years ago, The Future of CRM, for Business Week. In the article, I interviewed customer relationship management (CRM) guru Bob Thompson and other experts.

 

The article isn’t dated on businesweek.com, but likely it was written in 2000, maybe as late as 2001. It had to be post- New Year’s 2000 since there isn't a word in it about how to Y2K-proof your CRM.

 

The article was a meeting of the minds on CRM. The best and brightest CRM experts — people like Jim Dickie, Erin Kinikin, Dick Lee and Liz Shahnam — were tapped and asked about the future of CRM.

 

Well, friends, the future is now. So let's see how smart we were.

 

“In just a few years Customer Relationship Management has emerged as a powerful business trend. However, the best is yet to come,” the article predicted. Check — one for one. The article also predicted that “CRM is here to stay but will evolve.” Talk about going out on a limb!

 

High-Yield Marketing's Dick Lee said: “CRM is fundamentally the expression of the customer-centric business philosophy. It's how you respond to the fact that customers are now the drivers in our economy.”

 

Is that still the case? Yes. Another panelist for the article, Insight Technology Group's Managing Partner Jim Dickie said his firm had just finished its annual state of the CRM marketplace review, and found “major changes: A West Coast financial institution is realizing that you've got to sell the way customers want to buy.”

 

Dickie was right and wrong at the same time; right in that that's how things should be, but wrong because far too many companies are still waking up to the fact that they have to sell the way customers want to buy.

 

Liz Shahnam of META Group was blunt about the importance of customer touch points: "CRM projects that don't integrate customer touch points are destined for abject failure." Correct.

 

"Vertical solutions are another hot trend," the article observed. Kinikin said: “we're approaching the end of the one size fits all CRM market, and entering an age of verticalization and specialization.”

 

She was right… maybe. The much-longed for death of the one-size-fits-all CRM mentality has been as drawn-out as some death scenes in Shakespeare plays. Perhaps we were a bit optimistic about that one.

 

“There are different types of customers, different types of business models and selling strategies, and over time there will be different CRM software to support these different models,” the article predicted. Jim Dickie agreed: “What you had in the past was companies developing a tool set, and saying go and customize it for your industry. But now you have vendors coming into the market saying they will give you a 110 percent solution for a specific vertical.”

 

Again yes, and we certainly hoped that would happen. It hasn’t happened as fast as would be ideal, and in fact generic CRM is still alive and well. But, you can find more specialized CRM today.

 

Most panelists for the article saw increased functionality in CRM suites coming “soon,” even as functions associated with CRM were cropping up elsewhere. Dickie correctly saw this as an efficient versus effective issue: “A lot of the stuff we've done has been focused on efficiency, like giving the sales rep more time to make average sales calls. We're realizing the issue is really effectiveness. I need my average rep to make great calls. I need my average service person to make great service calls.”

 

CRM customers even back then were demanding more and more knowledge management functionality. “Essentially, in the e-business economy, you need to deliver customer organizational knowledge on demand, anytime anywhere,” Kinikin said. Dickie agreed, noting that: “we're seeing a push to a lot more functionality being put into the CRM tools themselves.”

 

Lead-tracking systems are great, Dickie said, “but what I really want now is knowledge management systems, sales coaching systems, and service intelligence systems to help take the next step.”

 

The led to the most incisive prediction in the article: “In short, the future of CRM is bright indeed. CRM will become deeply ingrained as a business strategy for most companies.”

 

Also: “technology will evolve while technical and organizational challenges are overcome. Much will change in the years ahead, but one thing is certain: CRM is a journey, not a destination, and customers have their hands on the road map and the steering wheel.”

 

It's also notable to look at what wasn’t predicted in the article. Hosted CRM was available back then, but I don't remember anybody thinking it would become such a big thing. Maybe they were secretly harboring such insights and selling it to their clients in the paid newsletter, but if there were any discussions prefiguring, say, Salesforce.com, or that Microsoft (News - Alert) would offer hosted CRM, I wasn't in the room.

 

In fact, I remember discussions three years ago with a smart, highly successful CRM entrepreneur who said he was confident Microsoft wouldn't offer SaaS (News - Alert) CRM, mainly because the company would have to cannibalize its entire business model to do so, and Wall Street wouldn't allow that to happen. Whether Microsoft comes out on top remains to be seen, but the company definitely is out there swinging.