Chapter 10. Software Products

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There is a plethora of software products on the market. Many make extravagant claims about their ability to enable greater productivity, speed of implementation, etc. Also, the vendors may claim that their products are CRM products. It never ceases to amaze me just how many different labels a single product can wear during its life. I can think of one product that is, basically, an SQL query tool. It has been in existence for quite a long time, since about 1990, and in all that time since, it hasn't really changed all that much. There is a Web version now and an OLAP interface, and most of the sharp edges have been removed. Basically it's a good query tool, but it's still a query tool. When I first encountered the product it was being marketed as a query tool “very good and quite appropriate really, because that is what it is. Since then, however, the vendors of this product have claimed it to be:

A data warehousing product
An OLAP product (before the OLAP interface existed)
A data mining tool
A CRM tool

While this kind of constant reinvention of products is not new and to IT people it is neither surprising nor particularly of concern, it can be the cause of some projects to fail. The problem is that some people think that if they buy the best-of-breed toolset, then they are more likely to be successful. This has been proved, time and again, to be nonsense . Let's open this chapter with a slightly controversial statement:

There is no such thing as a CRM product.

Such a remark might result in some product vendors bristling with indignation. The statement is nevertheless true. There are some products that can help us to implement our CRM strategy, but there are no CRM products per se.

This chapter describes some of the types of product that can help us in implementing our CRM strategy and puts them into context. Specific products are not evaluated nor even mentioned, but the characteristics that these products have are described and evaluated and it is hoped that this might assist in the selection of products.

It is worth remembering that the kinds of software products we will be describing tend to be relatively expensive, being three or four orders of magnitude more expensive than desktop products. So, where possible, it makes sense in the early days of a CRM project to focus on collecting and presenting the information that the business needs and defocusing on the products. We should only be investing in these systems where there is a clear business reason for doing so.

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