Customer-centric or not, every company generates information about its customers that may be used by any department of the company - e.g., invoicing for accounting, customer feedback for product development, sales performance for incentives and compensation management, etc. Traditionally, CRM solutions did not offer functionality that would allow companies to use CRM data in any department other than sales and marketing. Also, functionality that was not specific to CRM but still related to it, such as business process management (BPM) and project management, was very little supported by CRM systems.
This has changed a lot over the past decade, when vendors started providing add-ons and apps that can easily be plugged into or unplugged from the core CRM system and also offering development platforms that people can use to develop their own tools or to customize their existing CRM solution.
