Five reasons why CRM projects flop

However, according to Altimeter's 2014 State of Digital Transformation Report the majority of organisations find cross-departmental collaboration difficult as people are swamped with heavy workloads trying to keep up with day-to-day responsibilities. This means that organisations must orchestrate the collaboration automatically to ensure success. Companies need to consolidate the entire picture of the customer's digital world, define what's most important and make sure it can be actionable, by bringing it into workflows. Without a high level understanding of who needs what data, where and when, it's almost impossible to provide users with the actionable real-time information they need to be more productive. Whether it's one data source or several, lacking a big-picture view of the enterprise leads to further silos and missed opportunities.

Ensure you have a big-picture view by mapping out the information flows that your enterprise needs in order to run its most common and critical processes, from CRM to ERP, call centre, e-commerce, and other enterprise systems to ensure a full and complete view of customer histories, orders, credit status, service issues, and more. Visualising these data flows allows users to contribute their intimate knowledge of bottlenecks and shows where integration can automate processes that are currently manual and laborious.

The best approach to getting the desired user involvement is to appoint users champions in each department. The champions should have a deep understanding of departmental processes and system usage, understand the pains of the users they represent and be able to articulate potential concerns to management. Having multiple champions also mitigates risk should one of them leave during the process. Champions thus become a key conduit between management and users, with visibility of the big picture and strategy, and the input to highlight inefficient processes and problems.

In addition, employee involvement can be encouraged by using an informal 'water cooler' approach in which users are invited to identify the most important data and processes that can help them provide the best service and work more efficiently. Getting employees involved early and often increases the chances for smooth adoption of the new CRM as a portal to the enterprise and helps optimise the business benefits.

Don't forget to apply the 'actionable principle' to dashboards and reports as well. Make sure management and users have quick access to important information and key performance indicators, in a manner that can be easily understood and acted upon. Just like process flows need to be mapped out, action flows need to be as well; both need to be part of the big-picture view.

While most CRM vendors offer mobile apps, these tend to be 'vanilla' and not appropriate for all users. Customers, partners, and presales people can all benefit from having access to integrated mobile apps, but they don't all need the same process flows or access. Rather than trying to build one overarching mobile CRM app, it can be best to start with the vendor-provided app and use a smart mobile app development platform to create custom process-specific apps rapidly for different stakeholders as needed.

A successful CRM implementation project depends on knowing how customer information can be leveraged to create business value and positive experiences for your customers and users. This requires that you start with a holistic view, but then focus on the most beneficial information and processes. You know you've built an effective CRM system when it becomes the first and last application checked by your users every day.