Five things that kill CRM ROI dead

8 Apr 2013

CRM is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago, but if it's no longer a money pit, that doesn't mean it's necessarily delivering the most bang for the buck either. Businesses can get better ROI from their CRM if they avoid some common mistakes: creating a siloed CRM system; letting sales and marketing squabble; ignoring reports; blasting messages on social media; and turning a deaf ear to customers.

Back in the old days - like around 2003 - the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70% of implementations were failures. That was an estimate - companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scientific sample was impossible. Still, the number reflected the general dissatisfaction businesses had with that generation of CRM.

A decade later, things are better. CRM vendors have focused on areas that users identified as sticking points, and users are coming to CRM better equipped to internalize the ideas of CRM so their own actions don't lead to failure.

Yet there are still things that businesses do that sabotage CRM - or at least prevent them from capitalizing fully on the information CRM collects and makes available to sales, marketing and support.

See the five worst offenders here, courtesy of E-CommerceTimes.com.