Embedded CRM - New fad or finally something relevant in CRM space

Have you heard about "embedded CRM"? Well you should not because I have created it by linking these two words together. For a number of years I have taken it granted and implemented ideas in many companies but finally I have created this term to describe it. Have you heard about CRM failures? Most likely you have because majority of CRM implementations are more or less crap or at best have very limited value for business.

Some of you must have worked in a company which has a CRM program trying to create cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, laying in the outer circles of business management. Program has its own management (CRM manager/team) and it reports either to IT or marketing communications management. Marketing has its issues with the CRM program and team managing the program because actual marketing has nothing or very little to do with initiatives under CRM program. They live separate worlds. There you have your failure reason number one - CRM has very limited success odds as a program

Some other of you must have worked in a company which has CRM implementation as a software. B2B sales is asked or forced to store all client interactions into this program. A few years (or many years) back there had been a lot of internal buzz and excitement about implementing CRM approach (later to be realized it was only a software) in the company. Today some people in the organization are very passionately filling client contact details, meeting memos and funnel management activities to the software but many wonder the benefit of it all. Actual sales approach is living its own life because that is hard core sales not CRM. There you have your failure reason number two - CRM has very little business value as a separate software.

Some of you have taken the path that CRM is so past and CEM = customer experience management is the right path. Again CEM as CRM was implemented as a program or as a software. Few years will pass and another acronym will pop-up with new promises and CEM is so past. There is an enormous industry trying to create new acronyms, fads and software so there will be no lack of these in the foreseeable future.

Embedded CRM? Very simple yet difficult to implement because you need to really make some real and concrete changes in you company. Nice about taking CRM as a program or software is that you don't really need to change anything in the core fundamentals of business management.

Embedded CRM has the idea that CRM is embedded in your business model and core fundamentals of business management. So when do you have your CRM embedded? Examples
- When your online store tracks existing customers buying behavior and you treat them with these insights
- When your corporate sales program is measuring customer revenues and analyzes customer transactions data for the benefit of sales activities
- When your service business utilizes customer data (transactions and customer log-in profiles) to create customized experiences
- When your offerings are understood customer-in, not inside-out
- When you segment your customers based on their motivations and offering usage occasions not on demographics... and you have activated this model to daily operations
- When your strategy has a) above things embedded and b) your strategy defines customer market spaces where you compete (market space = clustered life and daily life occasions or clustered business usage occasions vs. your production line defines your industry)
- When your management agenda has no more CRM terms as a last item but CRM is embedded in different core topics

So CRM should be understood as a customer-in mindset powered with CRM capabilities (databases, analytical tools, software, etc.). On paper very simple, as said here many may disagree that that is not CRM and in practice very hard to implement. Mindsets are more difficult to change than visible assets company has - but you need them both because then you have embedded CRM into your mindset and assets.