A recent Forrester Research report from Bill Band, who is a bright guy and whom I respect a lot as an analyst, surveyed a bunch of businesses. A strong percentage said they found their CRM implementations disappointing in four key areas – marketing, customer analytics, customer service and indirect sales.
Now, there was no mention of what CRM tools those surveyed were using, but as an analyst, I have a few ideas of why these are still trouble spots. And they are about both technology and policy failures. (To be fair, Bill does a great job in the report noting how poor planning, strategy and understanding of process methodology can easily lead to failure in any CRM area.)
Marketing – The main problem with marketing ROI and CRM is that people tend to think that by putting marketing initiatives “inside a CRM tool” will simply make your campaigns more effective or give you magical insight into customer behavior. It won’t. All marketing tools do it automate and make more efficient your existing processes. And a lot of CRM tools are not flexible enough to mimic your unique processesm which can lead to even more disappointing results.
Customer Analytics – This one is simple. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it.
Customer Service -This is an interesting one. I have seen a lot of companies try to create more informed service agents through data integration and/or a full CRM suite approach. Great. But without great training and processes in place to push the right information to agents in a useful format, these initiatives can provide little value. Also, a lot of CRM “suites” are nothing more than different products, all with different codes, bolted together. The transition of sales data into a support framework is less than seamless in these cases.
Indirect Sales – Managing a channel is not easy – there’s the cannibalization angle (both between you and your partners, and between partners) as well as timing and consistency of message. A lot of SFA tools are great for managing a single, direct pipeline. But channel tools have been lacking in a lot of areas. SugarCRM has some cool partner stuff, but I still think most horizontal CRM players have to look at what channel management software vendors (I like BlueRoads) are doing and mimic some of that domain smarts.
So…there’s my take on why these are trouble spots in CRM, even after all the money spent by customers and development made by vendors. But after all, it is about the individual CRM inititaive, there will never be one way to do it – and while some of these surveyed may have failed in one area, they may have been wildly successful automating core processes in other areas. That’s why I love CRM so much – it is a great balance of art and science.
Without proper planning, your CRM initiative could end up like this…
