The Financial Times: Head of Cognizant’s Customer Solutions Practice Talks About Social CRM

“CRM has really evolved,” says Peter Grambs. “The term today has a broader meaning. Originally it made lots of promises and did not necessarily fulfill those. The tools today are better and much easier to work with. Everybody is more experienced in thinking about and devising strategies for CRM and how to implement it—and it really is a complex beast.”

Grambs says that today’s CRM systems essentially scan and analyze each and every source of information about a customer to build an overview of their “needs, wishes and aspirations”— frequently in pictorial form. He notes that there have been two important advances: First, technology that automates the scanning and analysis of the data, and second, the ability to dig into social media to extract informal, often unstructured, information.

“We are going to see more and more that relationship analysis has a social component. More and more these systems will leverage social media for brand building and awareness,” he says.

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