The players of CRM: Although dominated by Siebel, dozens of vendors are competing.

By Susan Breidenbach
Network World, 09/11/00

Taxonomies abound trying to make sense of the buzz that is CRM. With so many products claiming to perform CRM, knowing the functions a product automates is a big help. Aberdeen Group currently breaks the field into five basic groups:

Sales Force Automation (SFA) does contact management, generates proposals, performs forecasting and so on. Vendors Trilogy and Baan trail Siebel here.

Customer support and service (CSS) products assign, escalate and track trouble tickets. Ideally, they glean customer data from these incidents and feed it to an SFA system. Choose one that supports any communication, phone, fax, e-mail and Web forms, so no matter how customers contact you, the incident is equally tracked. Increasingly, CSS vendors are supporting voice over IP, too. Siebel is joined by call-center experts Vantive and Clarify, with the latter now a part of Nortel.

Help desk has become CRM because it often supports customers accessing an extranet. This is the only CRM segment in which Siebel is an also-ran. Remedy dominates the category and is pursued by vendors Peregrine, Tivoli and Network Associates.

Field service CRM is work-order dispatching, ordering parts, logistics and maintenance. Companies often overlook this aspect of customer contact, in part because not all CRM vendors support it. Products that do come from market leader Siebel, RTS, Metrix, Astea, Clarify, Great Plains and Baan.

Marketing automation is the smallest CRM segment, but it is growing four times faster than CRM. It handles marketing campaigns and generates leads, so it should be integrated with SFA. Products may pull information from data warehouses and databases to deliver the right offer to the right person at the right time. Siebel is chased by Oracle and Edify and Web-based newcomers E.piphany (which acquired RightPoint last fall), Broadbase and Personify.

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