These days more and more buzzwords flying around. Often new buzzwords for just a modification of something traditionally. Ad the end of the day we should leave the buzzwords and focus on what we want to achieve.

To bring a bit light into ERP, CRM, CEM, CIM and CXM let’s have a look into a short description.

ERP – Enterprise Resource Planing

“Enterprise resource planning is the integrated management of core business processes, often in real-time and mediated by software and technology.” ¹⁾https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning An ERP system fulfills the company side, means the company business and (internal) processes.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management

“Customer relationship management is an approach to manage a company’s interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.” ²⁾https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management

CEM or CXM – Customer Experience Management

“Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is the process that companies use to oversee and track all interactions with a customer during their relationship. This involves the strategy of building around the needs of individual customers.” ³⁾https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience#Management

CIM – Customer Interaction Management

CIM is the 2-direction communication between a brand and a customer through marketing, products and services.

We can divide this 4 topics into 2 areas. First there is ERP which has the company focus, second there are CRM / CEM / CIM which have the customer focus.

Bringing the company and customer side together is important.

These days the customer focus is getting more and more important. We need to understand and interact in a short period of time (real- or near-time). Therefore we need to rethink our internal processes and map our systems with new requirements.

Is CEM the better CRM? …and is this the end of the evolution? I already covered this in this article. CIM can take place before, after or beside CEM. Both have in common the customer / user centricity.

A business case can be handled for example in an ERP or a CRM system today. But how does this business case change in future? Is it going more into customer centricity then maybe a CRM solution is more future proofed. Maybe we still have an ERP system in place which we can (simply) attach to an CRM system or an ERP could solve the case much better. There is also the question who is working with these systems and do we need to connect them to another system behind?

If we have a marketing hub (SaaS marketing solution) in place, this can work better with an CRM system than an ERP system. Maybe it needs the information from an ERP system directly or “translated” through an CRM solution.

So the question is, if we need both systems or just one and which is the better one!? The answer is: The is no general answer. It depends on your business, your future vision and what you want to achieve. It also depends on the kind of data you are handling and which system has the better performance and better APIs. Think about raw vs. aggregated data or structured vs. unstructured data. Think about analytics and predictive analytics… Do you need a separate solution here or is there an integrated available which covers your needs?

The market is shifting in the #CustomerCentric direction. Internal processes need to follow customer needs and not the customer the companies processes. The customer interaction needs to be automated and in real-time. Make sure…

• …you have a system in place which is flexible and allows you to adopt to new requirements quick and easy.
• …purchase, sales, service and marketing work together through an integrated system which is working on the same centralized data.