Customer relationship management hasn't been at the acronym party for long, but is already being shown the door by the marketeers of yet
another three-letter technology - ERM.
According to Garry Munden, regional director for enterprise applications developer Kana, which has just entered the local market, ERM (enterprise relationship management) is a more viable option for Internet business than CRM.
Munden claims that ERM is different to CRM because ERM software is designed to enhance e-business directly via the Internet, without full integration with a company's intranet, like CRM.
Munden said Kana's ERM software does not pull customer data from any specific database. Rather, he said his company's ERM products located data "objects" in their existing locations - including a customer's own Web-connected database- and drew them together on the user's interface.
He said ERM was designed to enable companies to communicate with millions of customers at a time, whereas CRM technology enabled companies to communicate effectively only with less than 10,000 customers at a time.
CRM was a viable technology option for telephone call centre- or branch-driven business, he said. Anthony Seagge, director of professional services for IT outsourcer
Datacom's call centre arm, dismissed claims of restricted scalability pertaining to CRM software. Seagge pointed out that his company's call centre in Australia used CRM products to service some companies with over 1 million clients.
He said "prohibitive" costs meant ERM best served "utility-style" companies that did not need to upgrade their customer communications systems regularly. CRM implementation and upgrades were around 50 percent of the cost of ERM products offering similar functionalties, he said.
Kana lists the Telstra.com portal and the newly refurbished e-tail arm of David Jones among its Australian customers.
