Ovum reports role of CRM Solutions in driving Seamless Customer Experience

Although customer relationship management (CRM) is a mature market from an enterprise perspective, many organizations across all sectors and regions of the world continue to invest in CRM systems. This has been revealed by global analyst firm Ovum. Some organizations are already into their third or even fourth deployments.

In its latest evaluation of CRM solutions, Ovum found that organizations that have made great strides in creating a seamless customer experience are now looking further ahead to customer-adaptive enterprise (CAE).

Jeremy Cox, Principal Analyst of Software – Enterprise Solutions, Ovum, said, The relative importance of CRM software functionality diminishes as the customer vision widens to the customer experience or beyond to a customer-adaptive enterprise. However, the more holistic the customer vision, the greater the importance of the vendor’s portfolio of pre-integrated offerings or its ecosystem of ISVs and implementation partners to do the heavy lifting required for more enterprise-wide and complex projects.

Cox further added, Any transformational CRM vision, whether focussed on the customer
experience or CAE, requires a portfolio of applications that work seamlessly together to enable anyone in contact with the customer to deliver context-aware, relevant information.

Ovum identifies Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM, Salesforce.com, and SAP CRM as the market leaders. These solutions are comprehensive, suitable for a broad range of large enterprise requirements, and are widely recognized and successful in the CRM market. Two of the solutions in the leader category  Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com  are eminently suitable for the mid-market. Meanwhile, Oracle Siebel CRM features a deep industry sector-specific expertise.