The term “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM) as it applies to both a practice and a platform, can take on different meanings, especially in B2B versus B2C environments. As you look to modernize your stack, you’ll want to make sure there’s internal alignment on this topic.

At RSG we commonly see four different definitions.

1. Most commonly CRM means an automation platform for salespeople and account managers; that’s why Salesforce chose “CRM” as their stock ticker symbol. This is typically how RSG employs the term
2. However, in other firms, CRM might mean a customer support or service platform
3. In B2C enterprises (like consumer goods firms) that traditionally sell through intermediaries, the term CRM might represent their growing dataset about those ultimate consumers, or perhaps the marketing platforms upon which the firm interacts with those consumers
4. In other cases, CRM might mean the authoritative customer database or data warehouse overall, what RSG usually labels a “customer data hub” in your stack

RSG once helped modernize the stack strategy at a major financial services firm where all four of these definitions were in active use, causing much internal confusion, and worse: paralysis. In their case, we ultimately concluded that "CRM" was best understood a vision for customer data availability in different digital and human engagement environments. We ended up avoiding it as a box in their to-be stack diagram, and making sure the concept was instead part of the overall architectural strategy.

In the end though, whichever definition you align around is less important than actually settling on one in the first place.  Let me know if RSG can help...