As we left it, CRM eventually went from enabling a team of people across a company to document, interact and share their knowledgeabout each customer, to essentially favor data collection about customers to find common cross-customer issues and forecast planning.
This is not only to preserve knowledge and history about the customer, but also ways to drive new value from the same customers or those in related companies or fields.
Companies that use CRM to bring together relevant information in separate teams can extend knowledgeabout a case, customer or scenario beyond what is stored in the system of record.
The ability to gain the kind of knowledgeabout the need of that customer base so fast allows us to re-purpose our technology and invest in a way that would have taken much longer without the lab.
Oracle is moving to boost sales by hiring more salespeople with specialized industry knowledge, and revamping its customer advocacy groups to learn about product problems faster.
The amount of domain knowledgeabout the business and the legacy systems that is embedded in the software developers is what the customer pays for and not really the technology fixes that get delivered through the year.