The Software Formerly Known as CRM?

There was a buzz in the air at this year’s CRM Evolution about the sudden realization that Customer Relation Management (CRM) is dead. One of the new replacement terms thrown about quite liberally was the term Customer Managed Relationships (CMR). Unfortunately, the first time I heard this term was from Paul Greenberg while describing how Disney viewed CRM and that was over 5 years ago; and I’m sure Disney had been using the term internally for a while. Wow, that’s quite a lead time for the rest of the market to adopt a new term; which seems odd given our proclivity for abandoning old terms (>12 months) and picking up new ones.

The problem with this new (er) term is that it goes from completely inside-out, to completely outside-in. While I’ve always used the term outside-in in the same breath as customer-centricity, the age of co-creation has made me re-think this a little bit. Our customers may have more choice; but companies still provide the critical mechanisms that they interact wi…