The Widgetization of #CRM

I’m a long time CRM consultant and architect, but I’m a fairly horrible CRM user. I know this for two reasons. First, I deal with projects and one-off requests more than I deal with the traditional Sales, Marketing and Customer Service roles. I still deal with them, it’s just in the context of the project, generally or some ad hoc situation. I’ve worked with very few internal CRM implementations that have integrated project management into our CRM platform well. Mostly because we spent our time on our customers and not on ourselves.

The other reason I know I’m a horrible CRM user is because my customers always show me how to do something in a way that the vendor, or the consultant, had never thought of. Sometimes this is this great, and I try to remember it when designing a process or interface. Sometimes it’s horrible, and is the reason I spend a day and a half attempting to duplicate an issue. The bottom line is that given a huge and comprehensive piece of software, there are, not co…