PROSPECTS OF THE CRM
Commodisation of the low value added services will continue unabated - in fact it will likely get worse. This will continue to put suppliers like mail houses, printers, vanilla data houses and similar under heavy pricing pressure.
Unless the business addresses the issue of professionalism and substantive trade representation the 'profession' will disappear.
Continued move to e-based Marketing; this will leave those who have not embraced it floundering.
Systems
Still too many Marketers are calling a couple of .xls spreadsheets and an ACCESS table their Customer Database. This is changing and the pace of change will increase as systems become more easily available.
Too many vendors are calling simple Contact Management systems 'CRM' This won't change until they all go out of business
The gradual move to hosted systems seen in 2004/5 is becoming faster though all the predictions of the Gartners of this world are proving to be wide of the mark. This country is 2 years behind the US but companies such as Salesforce, NetSuite and MarketDeveloper are now getting real traction. Unfortunately the real cost of hosted systems will increase for two reasons 1) customers are pushing for more and more security and functionality as standard 2) verticalisation - the process of increasing functionality for groups of users means that systems will more closely match a customers requirements. The corollary of this is that costs will rise as one of the prime drivers of low price disappears.
It was thought that lower priced systems would make the traditional bureau redundant. Far from it. One reason systems like Salesforce.com are not 'sticky' is that the Marketer still has to do too much data work and administration. This opens the market for 3rd party integrators and bureau who adapt.
We'll see much more integration of 'point' systems into generalised Marketing systems as developers concentrate on what they do best and bring in API's for the rest. Good examples of this start at the simple end of quick addressing systems, through data cleaning and suppression up to seamless matching and de-duplication.
The desire, on the part of practitioners, to systemise the workflow of the process elements of their jobs will continue.
Management will continue to exert pressure on DM to justify itself through measurable ROI. Practitioners will come under increasing pressure to show distinct and measurable results. (Wasn't that what DM was all about?)
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