Leader: Make CRM easy for SMEs

CRM and SME - six letters that often don't go together that well, at least in terms of actual information technology used to improve customer relationships. However, this week we hear that small and medium-sized enterprises will finally look with some conviction at CRM over the next three years.

Are we to believe this?

CRM doesn't have to have anything to do with technology. We've said that before. Good salesmen with contacts books and telephones were doing their thing years ago and still are. Indeed, there are still plenty of good shop-keepers whose put-a-name-to-every-face skills and memory for who bought what and when sees them through.

But our point is that CRM technology could make life so much easier for them and many others who may even consider themselves IT literate already.

Big organisations - enterprises and public sector departments - have in some cases discovered electronic CRM a long time ago. How else did a Siebel Systems get rich?

Too often, however, the approach of the big organisations who have budgets and expertise - whether in-house or from various consultants - to match their profiles hasn't been transferable to SMEs.

Analysts Datamonitor reckon that will change, with sector revenues derived from SMEs rising to 27 per cent of a total of $1.8bn in 2008 compared to 17 per cent of a total of $808m last year. Leading the way will be CRM that allows salesforce automation - music to the ears of a salesforce.com, we imagine.

But there is also a wider opportunity here, one the whole CRM market has its eyes on. Deals this week between easyJet and RightNow Technologies, a rival of salesforce.com, and even news that football clubs are to up their CRM efforts, show the scope for allowing better customer touch points.

It sounds like a leap but even a respectable hairdresser should be able to operate a decent CRM system off what could be a standalone PC. Think about it: alerts after a given period of time, discounts for coming in more frequently and information held on who did the customer's hair last time, what the style was, what they thought - even how much they tipped.

Making this kind of activity a no-brainer for SMEs - quite possibly over a narrow-band internet connection - is a must if we are to get the majority of businesses benefiting from CRM.

It's not inevitable that the large enterprise market gets saturated and the technology works its way down. It has to be easy.