The customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) sectors have been grabbing headlines recently thanks to merger activity and the appearance of new entrants.

CRM's on-demand revolution continues with Sage the latest vendor to launch a hosted system, and it surely can't be too long now until SAP follows suit.

Meanwhile, Siebel users are concentrating on the planned Oracle merger. In the BI business, Microsoft's push continued last week with the announcement that it has built BI capabilities into the forthcoming Office 12. The company touted the "BI for the masses" tagline now favoured by many vendors of the technology.

As we're often told, users are too attached to their Excel spreadsheets to get proper value from the BI systems their employers have implemented. And so the stage was set for a scramble among BI providers to integrate Excel with their platforms to make the systems more usable for non-experts. Microsoft is coming from the opposite direction and adding BI features to its spreadsheets.

On both the BI and CRM fronts, the most common argument used in the technologies' favour is that they let employees access relevant information about the business and customers ever more quickly. This helps users to do a better job and improves decision making. I've heard examples of contact centre staff receiving details of customers' buying habits during a call, enabling them to cross-sell a variety of products; and I've been told about executives being able to more easily identify and track the promotions that have been most successful.

But what I don't come across so often are examples from the other side - the customer experience. The aim of deploying BI or CRM technology is surely to increase sales or customer satisfaction by speeding up the process of linking consumers to the information or products they want. Although organisations might have the back-end systems in place to provide the information, the integration with the front-end can fail to ensure data is at the employee's or customer's fingertips.

I've yet to come across an online shopping site that lets me talk to a customer service representative via instant messaging, for example, while I'm browsing. Instead if I have a query I'm asked to send an email or fill in an online contact form - which from my experience fails to generate a response in about half of cases - or call a customer helpdesk and wait in ever-longer queues.

The customer element also tends to take a back seat in firms' radio frequency identification (RFID) wireless tag rollouts. RFID projects are often promoted as a means of improving stock control or reducing counterfeit goods, both of which have obvious benefits for organisations and implicit advantages for consumers.

Privacy groups often argue that there are dangers in item-level tagging, so why don't retailers respond by spelling out the advantages to consumers? For example, rather than just discussing stock control, retailers might explain how the tagging of items could help to ensure that customers coming into stores are more likely to find the goods they want on the shelves.

Technology can create an immediate link between consumers and their chosen suppliers or products. It's a shame that so many firms choose to invest in IT yet still keep their customers at arms' length.