In stark contrast to the claims of many software vendors, TowerGroup firmly believes that customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy and not a technology. We believe there is no such thing as a "CRM technology" per se; rather we believe that financial services institutions (FSIs) that wish to execute a CRM business strategy in a mass-market environment must coordinate a collection of sophisticated information technologies across their enterprises. This TowerGroup Research Note provides an overview of some of the software vendors that offer technologies that can assist FSIs in the pursuit of a CRM business strategy.
Additional Information
Highlights
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy that relies heavily upon a multitude of sophisticated and complex information technologies. To successfully execute a CRM business strategy, financial services institutions (FSIs) must master technologies related to both the development and refinement of customer knowledge and technologies related to effective interactions with customers.
Developing and refining customer information highlights the dependencies that CRM practitioners have upon customer data. To successfully deploy a CRM business strategy, FSIs must enrich baseline customer data, increasing the value of the data into information, intelligence, and ultimately into actionable CRM strategies.
The technologies involved in customer knowledge can be segmented into four primary groups—data warehousing, data manipulation, decision support, and specialized marketing. While a few vendors will demonstrate expertise in one or more of these areas, it is uncommon for vendors to have competencies across all the customer knowledge technology groups.
Many of the companies listed in this Research Note have been reviewed in prior TowerGroup publications. Technologies that have not been reviewed previously will be discussed in future TowerGroup Research Notes.
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