This article on Technology News Caught my eye today -

VoIP Delivers CRM Power to Small Businesses
The cost and complexity of enterprise-level CRM solutions have up until recently left small businesses on the outside of the CRM toy store looking in. VoIP is changing the landscape of CRM options for businesses on a tight budget, giving small business owners a choice between three distinct flavors of CRM

Asked to define CRM, most enterprise Quintum VoIP solutions. The perfect fit for your Enterprise. executives will tell you it's the process of moving a company from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one. Since customers ultimately write your paycheck, it's not hard to see why enterprises have embraced this concept and the technology to enable it.

However, it's a different story for smaller businesses, which almost by definition are already customer-centric. It's the size -- and inertia -- of big organizations that builds barriers between companies and their customers.

This emphasized a point I've been making for several months now. VoIP and the related unified communications efforts are dreating a convergence that's a competitive enabler for SMBs. Like the story says, smaller businesses have always been generally more customer focused that huge enterprises. They live closer to where the rubber meets the road.

For most SMBs, existing customers and repeat business, coupled with word of mouth referrals are their lifeblood. Taking care of the company reputation and relationships is crucial for survival. A large company feels the pain of losing a single dissatisfied customer far less, but the relationship, in general is less intimate.

CRM technologies at the high end of the scale provide new work processes than increase efficiency, but let's face it, a major Oracle CRM implementation isn't something an SMB is going to undertake. The few SMBs that use that sort of a solution are...well Oracle practices using the technology that's their lifeblood.

Whether you want to call it VoIP or IP telephony, the truth is that the end game is unified of converged communications. VoIP is a milestone on the road, but it isn't the destination. But VoIP has seen a significantly lowered barried to entry for service providers. With Asterisk, the barrier was really lowered. But as application vendors, and other related communications providers of services and software grabbed ahold of the trend, the barrier to entry for SMBs was lowered as well.

Now, with converged services, SMBs can play among the big leagues with CRM and ERP systems. This is an advantage they really didn't have access to in the past. A win for the SMBs and a win for the solution providers who see them as crucial customers.


Technorati Tags: VoIP, CRM, lowered barrier to entry