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Everton Football Club has added TALENT Sport all-in-one ticketing and CRM system in an effort to update its customer facing and ticketing technology.

The famed Premier League Club got to test its new system, implemented to very tight time scales in October, in a big game when Everton played Liverpool. According to Andy Ward who heads ticketing at the club the system enables them to execute ticket-office processes faster, get more ticket sales online and it offers more opportunities to the marketing and sales department of the club.

Everton has witnessed an increase in online ticket sales and club supporters can now access the best seats at the most sought after games online. Earlier, the diehards had to book tickets via postal applications or at the bx office.

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It’s an interesting thought and I am not aware of very many verticals untouched, except perhaps the semiconductor industry. The trend for sometime has been toward offering industry specific solutions as the thinking over the past 5-6 years has been that the horizontal market has played itself out.

The big ones Oracle and SAP have around 25 verticals covered. These include Automotive, manufacturing, government, insurance, travel, retail banking, energy, healthcare, travel, financial services, high-tech, etc. Within the sectors covered, there will surely be a few industries that are as yet untapped, for example is there a CRM for the retail of books. Its not big business and it has its own unique processes so maybe its too much of a pain to go through pre-customizing a CRM solution for this business.

Surely, an enterprising SaaS player could dig up a few vertical niches that are not huge but capturing a few of them can give a vendor a good foothold to branch off later. Comments invited on CRM verticals as yet untapped.

Here’s something that I have always thought about and it seems am on the same wavelength as Shane over at ITWorldCanada. The issue here is regarding the importance that we need to accord to CRM products and in my opinion also how new a thing is CRM. Sure, the term is not more than a couple of decades old but as a stratagem CRM has existed as long as business and trade has been there.

So, the question to ask is what is it that makes a CRM endeavor a success? How much of it is the software and whether do you really need CRM software at all? To the latter question, lets say we do need the software but how do we then account for the astonishing rate of failure with CRM deployments.

The vendors are never going to agree that its the product. If it is the methodology then perhaps it means that companies are investing too much faith in the software and not bothering to get right the human aspect that involves intuition, lateral thinking, brilliant sales, good follow-ups, obtaining information from data and using it and other such skills.

It is strange that such a crucial aspect of CRM, the human angle, fails one CRM project after another. Its ironical that companies have many aspects of CRM well covered before they go in for a CRM deployment only to see things spiral downward later.

It is a telling statement on CRM usage that company employees often prefer to continue with the software they have been using for account management instead of shifting to CRM deployments instituted by the company.

SAP has taken cognizance of this fact and in an effort to increase usage among workers, it has announced an update to its CRM software, which will now feature a Web 2.0-style interface. SAP ’s Vice President of CRM product management Stefan Haenisch hopes to fulfill customer expectations regarding ease of use. The lack of employee buy-in into expensive CRM deployments can result in delayed ROI.

It is a sign of the impact that Web 2.0 applications have had on consumer behavior that even enterprise applications are now being redesigned such that their user interfaces satisfy customer expectations regarding ease of use from business software.

Oracle probably has the broadest set of CRM capabilities, thanks to its acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft, said Vuk Trifkovic, an analyst with Datamonitor in the U.K. “But I don’t think that reflects badly on SAP, they have good tools with a lot of features, and they’re a natural for anyone in the SAP ecosystem,” he said.

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