The following piece is not a fact based article, it is rather an accumulation of industry related decision makers' opinions and experience's regarding CRM solutions.

Relating to Customers

The question of why some businesses are superior to their rivals in managing their relationships with customers is better understood when considering the use of CRM solutions. In order to gain a competitive advantage within the CRM field, an organization would need to be able to monitor, and manipulate their customers' data correctly.

The manner in which customers cooperate and relate with organizations is said to be based on three different aspects, these can be identified as, configuration, orientation and information. An organizations corporate structure and its incentives that are aimed at customers fall under the configuration category. The orientation category deals with the mind sets and values of the organizations towards their customers. While the information category deals with the organizations ability to handle databases and the customers' correct information. Before an organization can relate to a customer it has to be able to fully control the above mentioned categories.

It is also found that a superior customer relating capability has a strong relationship with relative sales, profitability and customer retention performance, and thus leading towards a competitive advantage.

Most interest in CRM is based on:
- Improving retention of existing customers
- Identifying and acquiring new customers
- Cutting IT overhead
- Minimizing up-front cost

Once a solution is able to cover these four primary aspects then the major part of the effort has been completed, but this is undoubtedly a huge task.

Firms are continually seeking new ways to forge closer relationships with valuable customers in the belief that loyal customers are the source of most of their profits. With recent advances in customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, such firms have not only the motivation but also the means to forge closer relationships and deliver more value to their customers. Yet experience shows that CRM technologies alone are not the solution. More than half of all CRM projects have produced unsatisfactory results.

The shortcomings of CRM have been blamed both on software vendors for promising off-the-shelf solutions and on firms for underestimating the implementation problems and installing new information systems without having a well defined customer management strategy. Several commentators now claim that installing CRM technology before aligning the organizations strategy and restructuring organizational processes, performance measures, and incentives is the root cause of most failures.

A superior resource, such as a strong customer relating potential, is suspect to be productive unless it supports the organizations competitive strategy . These possible advantages should transform into superior performance in customer retention, sales growth, and profitability, resulting in a sustainable competitive advantage. The ability to have a continuous dialogue across all customer contact points is an essential element of CRM. The objective is to integrate information from various sources such as direct sales, telesales, websites, customer service, resellers and channel partners, to arrive at a logical picture of the customer and to be able to better serve that customer.

The personalized marketing approach emphasizes that dissimilar customers should be treated differently. The motivation is that customers vary in their future economic value and their principles in interaction. This brings in the assumption that any CRM program will assist in gaining a competitive advantage. One of the main driving forces for CRM solution failures has to be human nature. Countless organizations have implemented CRM solutions only to have it fail at the first hurdle. Millions are spent to implement these solutions but some how fail, this can't only be blamed on the vendors or the solution itself. One has to take a look at the organizations blood line, their employees and managers. Without their support the solution is certain to fail. Most organizations who implement CRM solutions believe that the vendors should not only design, develop and implement the solution but should also assist in the management thereof. This post implementation should be a standard for CRM solution venders, this is understandably correct as the products supplied by these vendors are aimed at managing continual customer support.

A few of the main reasons why CRM solutions fail include incorrect user requirements, which deals with the lower end users of the program not fully understanding the product or not being correctly motivated to using it. Some companies will implement the biggest or most sophisticated solution only to use certain functions, while the rest of the solutions uses go to waste. It is important to identify a companies needs before a solution is chosen. It is essential to use a solution that is relevant for the specific company, for example, the solution should be able to provide only the necessary documents for low end users, providing unnecessary documents would only slow down efficiency of the solution.

CRM's live and die by their EMPLOYEES acceptance , if the user refuses to use it, then it will become an expense. It is also important to remember that the end user of the solution views it in a detrimental light; it is always problematic to learn new processes especially for older employees. There has to be benefits for the employees using the new program for it to work successfully. Another important factor to keep in mind is the clients needs, the organization implementing the solution should first identify what information the solution should maintain, what are the clients needs, what information is going to be needed to develop a successful CRM solution. Together with this comes the opinion of the actual uses of the solution, its implemented to make 'life a little easier' and not more complex, the working functions need to be easy to understand and easy to operate.

KISS ( K eep I t S imple S tupid) methodology

A few major technical reasons for CRM failures is said to include an ineffective data migration strategy, where data was incorrectly or incompletely migrated. The second technical reason would consist of corrupted data that was transferred from the previous system; this could be reduced by proper levels of error handling. Other technical aspects would include an ineffective change management system resulting in poor quality levels of implementation. The major problem with corrupt data results in continuous investigations and backend fixes, this only slows down the implementation process.

Other problems that tend to develop after the implementation process has begun would include customers continuously changing their requirement which has a core influence on the design process. Finally the customer needs to understand that the new process is not an extension of the older system but is rather a completely new system that will require a 'new way of doing things'.

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