Reflection by NAME
The article Walk before You Run by Comity Technology Advisors focuses on the topic of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and on the rising importance of this function for modern organizations. It describes the recent trends in the internet environment, which make it more interactive and facilitate continuous exchange of information among people. This fact opens new opportunities for companies, however it also poses additional challenges and adds complexity to the existing CRM practices. The authors suggest that specialized CRM software systems should be implemented within organizations in order to manage the increasing sophistication of relationships with customers and to exploit the benefits offered by the increasingly social online environment.
The article primarily addresses CRM specialists and business people, who are involved in decision-making regarding customer relationship programs. Walk before You Run is written in a simple way and without using specialized terminology in order to target not only people, who already actively use CRM practices in their businesses, but also those, who have never used CRM. By discussing the benefits of CRM for the business in relation to the increasing interactivity of communication with customers, the authors inform their readers about the recent business trends and emphasize the effect of CRM and in particular CRM software, such as SugarCRM, on the success of contemporary business initiatives.
In conclusion, the authors summarize the article by bringing together the external trends of rapid technology development, the emergence of new communication channels and the increasing interactivity of marketing and customer relationships management emphasizing the fact that proactive management of customer relations is no longer an option but a hygiene factor for the success in any industry. Therefore, Comity Technology Advisors once again suggest the use of SugarCRM as an effective tool to manage customer relationships and to change working processes within the organization in order to make them more flexible, interactive and cross-functional.
The article Walk before You Run provides a good overview of the current trends in CRM and uses convincing arguments to support the claims. However, the task undertaken by the authors in the article is too great and the main message remains not very clear to the readers. The authors pursue a number of goals as they outline the importance of CRM in general, the increasing interactivity of customer communication and the promotion of SugarCRM software. Despite the ease of the writing style, the lack of focus in the article makes it hard for the readers to identify the most important ideas, thus some of the information presented by the authors is lost due to the complexity and the multitude of the issues raised. Therefore, it could have been more effective for the authors to limit the discussion to a few issues only and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the ways SugarCRM could help CRM professionals to deal with these issues.
