CRM applications in particular need to be constantly modernized because the majority of today’s business organizations have become “subject to change without notice”. A CRM application which was developed or acquired to solve yesterday’s business problem based on yesterday’s business requirement, may not fulfill the needs of today’s business process. The application must be aligned to the business needs and this is not a one-time alignment but rather an on-going need.
Even more important, most of the CRM applications existing today, were developed in the context of moving products through the sales channels and were not concerned with collecting information relevant to targeting a market. Thus, the average company’s customer data is not only scattered around hundreds of separate files and databases — sometimes with different data names for the same data elements, but also is not relevant to the company’s need to have a proper marketing strategy. Modernization allows us to ensure that the CRM application is presenting the right information to the user from the right sets of customer data. We cannot ever lose sight of the fact that the basic reason for the CRM application today, is to process data to build a proper marketing message.