CRM evolution 2012 chronicles

The biggest non-vendor CRM event is going full steam ahead, and it’s time to share some observations about how it is going.

As it was mentioned in a synopsis to one of our sessions, the concept of business process management (BPM) isn’t new, but its role and potential for supporting sales, marketing, and service have skyrocketed in the past few years. Since BPMonline is driven by an idea of merging process management into CRM, we were curious if this idea resonates in the minds of CRM influencers.

Except of our sessions, there were two more sessions about process management in CRM. The first one is from FedEx. They shared their experience in how to increase sales and marketing effectiveness through an improved customer engagement process. According to J. Paul Kelly III, Executive Solutions Manager, Sales Solutions at FedEx Services, “Streamlining sales processes can have a significant impact on the bottom line—especially for large enterprises.”

The second process-centric session was from guru of BPM, William Band, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. In his session he defined four key strategies for moving to process-centric CRM. He expressed his opinion about BPM+CRM in his recent blog: “Processes that touch customers and suffer from inefficiency and disconnects include: customer onboarding, order administration, loan processing, incident management, customer service, and investigations. As a result, solutions with a strong BPM backbone are attracting increased attention from organizations seeking to better manage fragmented customer interaction processes.”

BTW, all sessions related to BPM caused a lot of attention, so it was not surprising that our solution was in the limelight. We have heard over and over again from people who came to our booth that their companies suffer from lack of automated processes that would tie together main business pillars – sales, marketing and sales.

Conclusion? Not only opinion leaders or CXO-level people underline the importance of process management initiatives, but typical users demand for automated processes. For us, these few days are full of eloquent arguments for the fact, that BPM+CRM approach is a new bold trend in a CRM world.