Self-service CRM has arrived. Technologies such as portals, voice recognition, and next-generation search engines have improved so dramatically that they’ve become an indispensable part of the CRM arsenal. Vendors must now figure out how to help enterprises get the most from these new technologies, both to both improve customer experiences and lower costs. First, vendors will need to open up their solutions to fit enterprises’ heterogeneous infrastructures and self-service environments. CRM portal technology, for example, must plug and play nicely with other vendors’ portals. On the voice recognition side, although these applications are typically linked more tightly to specific CTI (computer-telephony integration) architectures, such as those provided by Genesys, Cisco, and Avaya, CRM vendors will have to provide open APIs or XML interfaces to work with all the players. Second, vendors will have to help customers better integrate their self-service systems with enterprisewide data. “Right now the problem is the 80 to 90 percent of the data that would be needed to solve a customer’s problem is generally disbursed throughout the organization,” explains Michael Maoz, vice president of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. Vendors must figure out how to better pull data from multiple sources into one interface so that the user or an agent can solve the problem. “[The answer to] my problem is not in Siebel, it’s in the supply chain or it’s in finance,” Maoz says. “They need workflow that cuts into the whole stack of applications to get to the answer.” CRM vendors also need to figure out what they should build and what they should license. Some technologies, such as e-mail response and Web self-service, need to be tightly integrated, whereas some, such as voice recognition, are more specialized and may therefore be better outsourced. Most vendors see themselves as integrators providing a complete solution. “We think our core competency is to provide the framework,” says PeopleSoft’s Barbry McGann, vice president of CRM product strategy in Pleasanton, Calif. “The value-add is being able to bring it into the business process.” But not everyone agrees. “For the next three to five years, it’s going to be the [third-party] integrator or the IT shop” creating the most value, says Gartner’s Maoz. “Especially with Web services, they’re just licking their chops and saying we can put this together ourselves.” — David L. Margulius Software DevelopmentTechnology IndustryDatabases