By my reckoning, I see about five major trends that directly influence how eCRM is being designed and deployed in corporate America. We'll learn to better use the Internet as a CRM tool. This is a pretty safe bet, because we still have a lot to learn. Among the great lessons learned from the dot com recession are that, unless you're selling porn, the Internet is not a great sales channel, not a great advertising medium, nor even great a direct marketing tool. The on-line experience as it relates to consumer behavior has limitations.
Most consumers still prefer to take out a mortgage at a local branch.
While some banking sites are great at attracting on-line visitors, they are notoriously bad at facilitating transactions. As we learned last year, most businesses don't want to risk procuring goods from anonymous suppliers on B2B exchanges. They prefer to do business with people they know and trust. Drawing upon these valuable lessons, businesses will begin to use the Internet channel more effectively, as part of their total customer-facing strategy. They will also learn to use it more discretely.