Companies adopted CRM systems at a frantic pace, hoping to centralise, manage and improve customer relationships. But too little attention was paid to the process of managing the customer lifecycle  and of integrating the different needs of marketing, business development and client relationship departments. CRM deployment proved expensive and in many cases failed leaving customer information locked in disparate databases and systems.

Today, however, new content information integration offerings are connecting these islands of customer information and heralding a new dawn for CRM deployments. Giga Group says that as companies deploy portals and enterprise applications like CRM, the need to deploy content organisation and classification technology becomes more important.

And CRM companies too, such asSalesforce.com and Siebel, have created 'live web links' within their products so that users can view more up-to-date and 'customised' external customer data from within their CRM systems. 

The OneSource Account Intelligence solution for Salesforce.com for example embeds OneSource's business information - comprehensive company profiles, executive contacts, industry information, financial data, corporate family trees and up-to-date news on new prospects and key accounts - directly within salesforce.com's CRM system.

The product, which will be offered to customers by both salesforce.com and OneSource, provides sales professionals with instant access to the tools they need to become more strategic and informed when engaging a prospect or account. It also delivers clean data for executives to make better business decisions through trusted insight and analysis.

The result is more valuable CRM systems that can provide vital customer information that is not out of date and includes more than is usually held on internal systems, significantly reducing the need for external research on customers and making it easier for companies to fully use their CRM systems to improve customer relationships and win new business.