The customer is king, or so the old saying goes. It's a very popular claim in the CRM sector, which has moved from being the preserve of giants to become a free-for-all.
With market leader Siebel losing customers in droves and grasping the security of Oracle ownership, the stage looked set for upstart, on-demand player Salesforce.com to sweep the field. Not any more. Next month, Microsoft's CRM 3.0 will hit office desks, backed by the resources and expertise of IT's biggest player.
The man in charge of driving Microsoft's CRM strategy believes that, until now, CRM has been too expensive and over-complicated (think Siebel) or too simplistic and restrictive (think Salesforce.com). Brad Wilson, head of Microsoft's CRM business unit, believes that a combination of simplicity and industry standard software will suit users of all shapes and sizes. That, he believes, is the key to success. Instead of forcing users into business models restricted by the vendors, give them the freedom to use the ones they already know. It sounds like 'CRM for the rest of us', so ZDNet UK talked to him to find out.
Q: You finished CRM 3.0 early?
A: Yes, we were going to make it generally available in the
first quarter of next year, but now we will be releasing it in early
December. We have had a tremendous amount of general anticipation
around this and between October and November we will have reached
between three and four thousand partners and given them a full day's
training on Microsoft CRM 3.0.
Did you decide to bring out the CRM tool early to take advantage of the situation at Siebel?
Not at all. Our development time schedules are independent of external
events like that. We finished principle coding back in May. We had a
very strong hunch we would ship early but we didn't want to miss that
expectation. But the Siebel acquisition has caused a lot of people to
rethink their CRM strategy and that has created opportunities for us to
engage in discussions with clients around what they are doing going
forward.
Are you ready to announce some of the strategy around the product, for example in terms of pricing?
We have not announced pricing, but for this edition we will have a small
business edition, which is pre-packaged for Microsoft Small Business
Server. We will
also have a Professional Edition, which is geared for mid-sized and
enterprise organisations — for more complex IT environments.
So the Professional Edition is designed to take on the likes of Siebel?
Oh yes. We are actually selling very successfully to enterprise
accounts right now. We're seeing a lot of interest at the enterprise
level in a different kind of solution to what Siebel offers. Our
approach is a bit different from that of other CRM companies.
We tend to really focus on user-adoption and user-experience. We focus on what we call a "native Office and Outlook experience" so it puts CRM where people already are, as opposed to trying to have a complex CRM application and force people to use that. Our whole approach of putting just enough CRM into the desktop, where people use Office and Outlook, is a big hit with all kinds of companies. With CRM, one of the biggest problems has been user-adoption in the past five years or so.
Why do you think adoption is specifically a problem with CRM?
User-adoption has been tough for CRM packages in the past because it
has always been geared around this other application — a very
complicated application. The model has been: here's this very
complex CRM app, all you have to do is re-engineer your people. That
doesn't often work well. Our approach has been: let's figure out how
people live and work all day and let's fit CRM into how that.
So we say, 'here is CRM that works the way you do'. That is our real message to the marketplace. You shouldn't have to be using Office and Outlook all day and then switching backwards and forwards to the CRM application. The CRM application should be where you work.
Therefore CRM 3.0 is designed to fit seamlessly into that kind of environment?
Exactly. We're really pushing a native Office experience, not
integration. It is truly built into Office and Outlook. That's what
people want and it really cuts across all segments. They want the right
amount of...
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