As social media continues to become more integrated into customer relationship management (CRM), the future of customer relationships will be shaped more by context than actual transactions.  Customer-driven integration is reshaping CRM and will accelerate as cloud platforms, combined with APIs, reorder the customer relationship landscape.

Lou Guercia (News - Alert), president and CEO of Scribe Software, and Betsy Bilhorn, vice president of marketing and product management at Scribe Software, recently discussed cloud-based CRM integration and the impact of the API economy with Business 2 Community. Cloud integration is the process of configuring multiple application programs to share data in the cloud.

Cloud integration is one of the fastest growing areas of enterprise software today, with many potential product and services strategies or cloud platforms from which to choose. For Scribe, one of the biggest cloud CRM lessons learned thus far is understanding that your cloud platform vendor affects your product offering and making sure your offering is portable.

“There are a many new cloud services and platforms – you have to make a choice between an established, proven vendor or taking a chance as an early adopter of something new. We decided to be an early adopter and we’ve had mixed results, which at times caused problems for our customers,” Guercia said. “Customers don’t care who caused your slowdown or outage – they expect that you have service available no matter what. As a result, we had to build out sophisticated and sensitive monitors, fail-over and availability capacity.”

Scribe describes a scenario that is becoming increasingly common in the 21st century, which involves a strategy of integration to align customer data to ongoing strategies.

Ultimately, it’s about customers being able to connect quickly, easily and seamlessly to other applications without having to stitch code together or understand what entities and methods to use, according to Guercia and Bilhorn.

One of the first things to remember when implementing a cloud CRM system is getting users on board, according to TMCnet’s Rachel Ramsey.

“This includes upper management – the CEO and top executives should set the example to improve CRM adoption,” she said. “After successfully bringing users on board, look at the value of CRM. Some CRM systems offer the ability to automate and create marketing campaigns without using third party software.”