Customer Relationship Management

 

CRM 2002 Vendor Guide - CRM Application Suites

 

Introduction

CRM Application Suites

Marketing Automation Vendors

Sales Application Vendors

Customer Service and Support

CRM Telephony and Infrastructure Providers

Voice Technologies/Speech Recognition

Integration Brokers

 

 

CRM Application Suites

 

A note on the vendor lists: The appearance or lack of appearance of vendors under the category lists that follow is based on Gartner's tracking of the CRM category. Gartner has no intention to endorse, rate or evaluate any specific vendor or their capabilities in this research report. Absence from a list does not necessarily imply that Gartner does not cover a particular vendor. The vendor lists are extremely volatile and may undergo rapid change. Gartner's purpose in publishing this research is to assist enterprises in understanding the full scope of vendor coverage within the Gartner CRM research team.

 

Gartner tracks CRM applications for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) use. Enterprises will increasingly emphasize the ability of a CRM suite to deliver integrated “bolt ons” to enterprise systems they have already deployed, e.g., the Oracle CRM bolt-on to SAP, PeopleSoft CRM to Oracle Financials and SAP CRM 3.0 to i2 Technologies’ supply chain management (SCM) products. The market has demanded this ability in other technologies, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), for several years. Deep vertical functionality will cease to be a survival strategy of the resource-constrained or narrowly focused vendor and, instead, will become the mainstream battleground for all surviving vendors. B2B enterprises, which sell to, market for and service other businesses (i.e., wholesaler/reseller vs. retail/end consumer), require CRM suite functionality with different strengths than those needed for B2C selling (see Figure 1).

 

Figure 1

Customer Relationship Management Suite Functionality

 

Sales	Customer service	Marketing
Opportunity management system   Sales configuration system   Partner relationship management   Interactive selling system   Incentive or compensation   Content management	E-service   Call management   Field service	Personalisation   Data mart or analytical software   Campaign management

 

Of the 12 key functionality components of a CRM suite, B2B CRM places the most emphasis on the support of:

 

·         Many-to-many relationships, including partner-to-partner collaboration

·         Mobile sales forces

·         Opportunity management

·         Proposal generation

·         Incentive compensation management

 

B2C CRM relies more heavily on analytics to build an understanding of the customer and have a relatively impersonal relationship with the customer (i.e., nobody owns a particular relationship, and the customer deals with many different people in the enterprise).

 

 

Source : Gartner

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Updated on July 2, 2003

 

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