By Chris Bucholtz

For a long time, CRM was defined in part as a technology and a det of processed that included two critical areas: sales and marketing. That’s been the classic definition, and it reveals a lot about why CRM has had a hard time living up to its promise. However, the the “R” part of the acronym is slowly becoming more appreciated, and as that happend a third leg on the CRM stool is evolving around service.

When you back up and look at CRM the way it should be viewed – not as something to support sales but to enhance relationships with customers and potential future customers – the inclusion of service makes perfect sense. All the efforts you put into marketing and selling can go for naught if the customer’s service relationship with your company goes sour. A lot is said about spotting dissatisfied customers on Twitter and making them happy, and thus making them loyal customers. However, not nearly as much is said about putting effort into service to solve their problems quickly and easily and making them happy – and keeping them from having to use Twitter or a personal blog as an alarm mechanism.

“Service has been treated like a red-headed stepchild in a lot of organizations,” says Dave Yarnold, the new CEO of Maxplore, a company that’s taking aim on this space. Yarnold is talking not about call-center stuff alone but about field service, where the rubber meets the road in some critical verticals, like medical equipment and manufacturing.

Maxplore’s entry into this field is ServiceMax, which is built and delivered as a native Force.com application and is integrated into Salesforce.com’s interface – not only an effective means of deployment but also a handy way of reminding all involved that service is an important element of keeping customer relationships strong. The product offers functionality for all aspects of field service – scheduling and dispatching, depot repair, preventative maintenance, spare parts inventory management and other functions. Since it’s an SaaS product, it dodges the high up-front costs of older solutions, and Yarnold says that, because of the application’s warranty and service contract management capabilities, it can show ROI almost immediately.

“One of our customers, before ServiceMax, had no way to check which customers were entitled to service,” he says. “They’d get nearly 2000 requests for service a year, and a healthy percentage of them were no longer entitled to service under their existing contracts. That represents a great chance to charge for service or to upsell them on a better service contract. Since the contract data was hard to get at, they ended up doing a lot of free work and missing a lot of opportunities.”

ServiceMax orders all this contract data and provides it to field service personnel (and, as the story says, service is the new sales). It also ties into other systems – parts inventory, depot repair status, service partner operations and other behind-the-scenes aspects of business that can impact the customer’s service experience. “It really straddles the area between CRM and ERP,” says Sam Mukherjee, the company’s president and chief customer officer, and one of its founders.

The company opted to use Force.com because it already provided answers to the issues Maxplore would have had to solve on its own. “For instance, multi-currency and multi-language – tackling those represents a big decision for most start-ups,” Yarnold says. “The Salesforce.com platform already had that in place, so we just had to follow their playbook and we could go back to concentrating on our product.”

Best of all from Maxplore’s perspective, only 10 percent of the estimated market for such solutions has been penetrated – “Most are still on home-grown solutions and spread sheets,” says Yarnold.

The emergence of solutions like ServiceMax is going to increase the perceived importance of service as one of the pedestals of CRM, and the economic environment we’re in right now, where existing customers are increasingly valued, is going to accelerate that growth. It may be sexier to acquire new customers, but it’s smarter to make the ones you have happy and loyal.