Business Process Management (BPM) Technology: CRM Savoir? By Pegasystems
Download the complete white paper now.
Pioneers can either be hailed as heroes or failures depending on the outcome of their conquest. Since the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM), many CRM applications have been widely, and unfairly, derided as failures. Business process management (BPM) technology is often positioned as the savior that's going to displace CRM and deliver on its broken promises.
Besides being false, that perception sets BPM up for the same fall that CRM took. The reality is that the two technologies are complimentary – they just represent successive steps in customer-facing technology's evolution.
CRM established the missing and vital link between front-line customer service and IT systems. When CRM emerged, customer service representatives no longer had to navigate separate customer, financial, shipping etc. systems to complete a customer transaction. CRM unified relevant systems under a single, easy-to-use interface. Their Achilles heel, however, was that they lacked sufficient access to corporate data sources, which were themselves poorly integrated and unable to provide a coherent, unified customer view. That's where BPM comes in.