Let’s avoid those Costly Rotten Mistakes

Yet we still have CRM projects failing left, right and centre. Many actually work in exactly the opposite way they are supposed to, drive customers away and impact the bottom line negatively.

AMR Research says at least 12 percent of all CRM implementations are complete failures. That means the systems never even go live. What's more, only 16 percent of all CRM installations actually improve business performance in a measurable way. So 85 percent of all CRM users cannot quantify any benefits at all. In today's "show me the money" economy, that's a nightmare.

Here's the really frustrating thing: as someone whose job it is to advise companies on their technology needs, I have seen the benefits of a well-executed CRM strategy time and time again, especially for medium-sized businesses who thought CRM was out of their league.

The key word here is "strategy". Having lived through the dotcom carnage, one would have thought it obvious that you draw up a plan before you implement anything. Yet you see organisations diving headlong into CRM all the time without having a clue about the customer strategy that the technology is supposed to help them execute.

Part of the problem is that we still don't understand technology fully. We persist in viewing technology as a silo, when we should be tearing the silos down and rebuilding integrated business technology organisations and processes.

We still see firms trying to foist CRM onto staff that don't have a customer focus or an organisation which isn't geared to building customer relationships. We tell our customers: forget about the software for now. Do your due diligence first. First analyse the company, then change your business practices, and only then look at the technology that makes it all work.

It's not rocket science. And once some companies realise that, they get cocky and try to implement a state-of-the-art CRM system in one fell swoop, thinking that the New! Improved! technology will instantly solve years of underlying people problems. What happens? Yes, more shelfware. The same people. The same problems. Sigh.

Before you spend millions of new technology, first pick the low-hanging fruit in your CRM environment. Pull together your data in one place. Aggregate it to get a consistent view, and then start to mine it for information that would better allow you to serve and sell to your clients.

Implement standards, and make sure your people do the right things for the right reasons. Manage your vendors. Get a strategy. Start small. We're evolving the relationship between business and technology, not turning it upside down. At the end of it all, we might even make some money.