Social Media and the End of CRM.

"It is not too soon to call the end of the business process known as CRM as we have known it, says Michael Maoz of Gartner. "It is the “management” part that kills it, he says, referring to the centralized way CRM tends to work.

Those will not be welcome words for firms that sell customer relationship management solutions, but does indicate how social media and networking are changing the context within which enterprise sales, marketing and contact management processes might be changing.

Simply, there are simply too many moving parts for traditional CRM applications to provide the promised value, he argues.

Enterprises and brands are exhorted to monitor, listen, poll, create and monitor feeds, tweets, posts, support mobile platforms, tablets and forums. Brands are urged to crowd source, support voting and other ways of gathering consumer insight. All of that is at least partly unstructured data that has to be processed in more structured ways to provide insight. But it is nearly impossible to do that within the scope of traditional CRM.

Businesses are attempting to add the new tools and processes, keep the legacy efforts for marketing, sales and customer service, while moving all of the business applications supporting the existing customer initiatives to the cloud.

That represents a lot of moving parts. So organizations have come to the tacit (not stated, not explicit) conclusion that they cannot accomplish the goal of managing the customer relationship centrally, he argues.

Just as certainly, CRM will become part of a wider set of activities; it has to.

Social Media and the End of CRM