I've started interviewing vendors for our annual CRM article, due out in the December issue of Call Center Magazine. One of the more charged questions I'm asking is based on something our editor Keith Dawson said in last year's article: "If your idea of CRM consists of putting customer data on an agent's desktop — and doesn't go any farther — then you are mismanaging that relationship."

In another one of our interviews for our November CRM deployment case studies article, I spoke to a couple of big shots at the Horizon Health call center in the Dallas, Texas area. The call center handles Employee Assistance Program (EAP) calls from its client's workers, who call to talk about mental and emotional health and stress issues.

What stood out most as I spoke to these two, one an IT manager and the other a call center manager, was how well they worked together. They were forced together when their company embarked on a huge call center consolidation, construction, and technology upgrade project. It wasn't easy at first.

I interviewed Donald Stickney, manager for the City of Minneapolis' 311 call center this week for an article about CRM deployment and I learned some interesting things.

For Minneapolis, the 311 number wasn't just going to relieve the burden on the 911 emergency system. It was going to take the place of about 275 different local phone numbers in the "blue pages" section of the Minneapolis phone book.

The city has a nice 5 minute video describing the goals and implementation of the 311 system on its website: City of Minneapolis 311 video. The video, in which Mr. Stickney talks about the new service, is a helpful overview of what a 311 system can do in general.

The beauty of Minneapolis' system is that calls are answered by live operators who, instead of transfering calls to other departments, fill out reports and give callers tracking numbers. Simple information requests can be handled with the help of a knowledge base. This gives citizens a greater amount of control. It really opens the city's dozens of departments up.

The most novel thing about 311 lines to me is the way they tend to use live agents instead of IVRs. I'm so accustomed to automation now that I was actually surprised when Mr. Stickney told me that the city expected to answer calls with human beings.

This is an odd model of efficiency for a bureaucracy. Odd because we used to expect this kind of transparency and smooth operation from money-making businesses. It's ironic to me then, that businesses -- and I'm thinking about non-municipal utilities like cable companies and mobile phone service providers -- have lots to learn about service and efficiency from city governments.

From Richard Snow, an analyst at Ventana Research, comes this take on the current state of the CRM technology landscape:

A blogger who describes himself as a sales professional has a fascinating post this morning about how to use Gmail - Google's free web-based email service - as a CRM tool.

He says that he's used Siebel, Microsoft and salesforce.com's tools, and found them wanting, and makes some interesting hack-like points about how gmail's openness and flexibility can be used for more nuanced selling and customer data retention.

I get the feeling that what he's really outlining is a single-user (or few-user) sales force automation tool, as opposed to true CRM, but if you're interested in the data architecture of a do-it-yourself "crm" tool, check out the blog.

Faster than the coffee in my cup can cool, emails from the press agencies for Siebel competitors come in... Looks like the pr people spent all weekend cooking up quotes for their CEOs:

From the reps for RightNow's Greg Gianforte: "Consolidation may well be the only way for the 'old guard' of enterprise software to grab market share since software purchasing clearly continues to shift to on-demand vendors. Siebel tried to make the the transition to on demand, but were late to the party. These old guard application vendors including Siebel, Oracle and SAP have struggled with customer satisfaction and I don't see how this move will help solve this problem."

From the reps for salesforce.com's Marc Benioff: "Client/Server software is being consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer Associates. Oracle's strategy is simple. Instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle's database. Now, the same thing that happened to Peoplesoft will happen to Siebel, it will die. Customers will look for new solutions and new providers. Employees will look for new employers. Siebel on Demand, a joint venture between Siebel and IBM, will be the first to be buried. Siebel on Demand is written exclusively on DB2 and Websphere and runs in IBM data centers. Oracle will kill it. Oracle does not sell DB2."

Any more floating out there?

So Oracle is buying Siebel - finally we come to the end of the great big ugly bubble. While we wish the two companies well in their new joint life, a couple of thoughts stick out about what has become of CRM in our time.