September 27

CRM — Doomed to Fail or Finally Realistic?

A recent article posted on searchcrm.com talks about a resurgence in CRM deployments and addresses some of the chief problems in rolling it out:

“A lot of people are finding out CRM is a lot harder than they thought,” Nelson said. “If you have a decent IT department, you can install CRM. The problem becomes fundamentally changing your philosophy of the customer and becoming customer centric. IT and business professionals, regardless of industry or what geography [they're] in, are going to face fundamental changes.”

…

There are eight core building blocks to CRM, according to Gartner, any one of which can doom a project to failure. They are: vision, how an organization will change by becoming customer centric; strategy; a valued customer experience, determining what the customer expects; organizational collaboration, how a company alters communication to accommodate change; customer information, focusing on the core customer data; technology itself; metrics that can be tracked; and customer processes.

The bold is my emphasis.

The newly realized emphasis on processes is something many companies missed in the CRM boom a few years ago. You see, some people assumed software could think and improvise. Alas, it cannot (yet) and we must be clear about the reasons for implementation and the processes surrounding deployment. Its all focused on the customer record.