Oracle's social CRM strategy and the future of CRM

Oracle's social CRM strategy and the future of CRM

What should we make of Oracle's social CRM strategy and the unveiling of its new social CRM applications? What does all this mean for the CRM market and how will it impact Web 2.0 startups?

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I think this a step in the right direction and Oracle is showing some leadership in the emerging social CRM (a.k.a. CRM 2.0) space. The phenomenon of the "social Web" -- which Forrester calls "social computing" -- is forcing CRM professionals to expand their thinking beyond the goal of optimizing a two-way relationship between an enterprise and customer to include the simultaneous interactions that customers have among themselves. CRM is evolving from its traditional focus on optimizing customer-facing transactional processes to include the strategies and technologies to develop collaborative and social connections with customers, suppliers and even competitors.

For example, the Oracle CRM On Demand product natively supports RSS, mash-ups and widgets. Its centralized message center enables collaboration and promotes application use by offering updates on the latest information posted by team members. Users can subscribe to notes for key records such as accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities, and are notified of team member updates as they occur. Users can track, manage and respond to received and subscribed notes via a centralized message center located on the Oracle CRM On Demand homepage, desktop or favorite portal. The product also allows companies to embed content and social tools (blogs, wikis and social network tools) within the application to deliver relevant information and enable rich interactions.

This was first published in October 2008