Part 1 - What is this CRM Stuff?

What is CRM? What is it for? 

Well, that is a great question and welcome to the very first of the MyCRM “What is this CRM stuff” newsletter.

Hi, I’m Alistair Dickinson and I have spent the last 24 years helping companies like yours with software solutions that help manage your customers and business data. 

You might know me on LinkedIn for Mapsimise.com, as this is our latest data platform, but MyCRM is at the heart of everything we do.

So lets get start and try and unravel what this means, it might take a few weeks so hang in there, as to be fair this is a very big ball of wool to untangle, as CRM means many things to many different people and 50% of them are experts. 

Let’s first explain, what does the acronym mean and what does “CRM” stand for, well if you did not know, it is “Customer Relationship Management” but I’ve never really thought that is did it any kind of justice as really the purpose is “Managing Customer Relationships, Service, Satisfaction and Engagement” along with many other features but MCRSSE+++ is a bit long winded, so we call it CRM. 

But let’s start at the very beginning, let’s jump in the time machine and go back to 1998, yes that is when it all started, when systems and software was being designed for business, with the objective to replace paper files and the sales rolodex.

One of the easiest iterations of CRM was Contact Management, yes, a database full of contacts and business you were working with, this was the first step, and today you can pretty much so this with any simple customer database.

But then things began to evolve very quickly as business owners started to embrace the dawn of the digital age.

Finance systems, planning systems and sales systems started to evolve, point of sale started to become digital and then consumer goods and operations along with purchasing got a makeover.

As a software engineer paid by the day back in the late 90’s it was a great time, probably similar to right now as we move into a social and analytical world of software, but more on that later.

As these systems evolved and the need along with requirements and ideas grew, the first fully functional CRM systems started to appear, you stated to see things like Peoplesoft, Onyx, Pivotal, Siebel and Sales Logix, then as the clocks ticked over to the year 2000 a new small start-up started to get some traction, a company called Salesforce.com, you might have heard of them

I still remember how the main vendors laughed at Salesforce and said nobody will ever use an online software solution for their business. But we all know today the outcome is very different and this is a great story of perseverance and innovation.

And those that laughed, where are they today you might ask, well they did not innovate so they disappeared

But back to the make up of CRM and its original purpose and functionality, originally the idea was that a single solution would manage Sales, Marketing, Support and Customer activity like email and tasks.

That is where it started, and over the next few weeks I’m going to start to unpack it all in some detail and try and explain what CRM means to your business and why you should have one.

It is not about the technology, more the process to delivering a great customer experience.

So do stay tuned as there might be video to, and do subscribe for more.

Alistair

CEO MyCRM Limited

CEO Mapsimise.com