In 1992 Jim Dickie characterized customer relationship management as not being easy, fast, cheap to implement--or an option.
While CRM, especially efforts geared toward linking disparate elements within a company, has received a significant amount of attention, success, says Dickie, is still not a given. According to research sponsored by CRM magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor, only 54.7% of all enterprise-wide projects are implemented on time, with an average wait to implement of just under eight months.
What’s more, only 12.7% of all respondents said they had "significant improvements" in effectiveness as a result of their programs, compared with the 28.1% that said they saw "noticeable improvements," and 23.4% who reported no measurable results. Some 36 % said they saw no measurable results in effectiveness.
Dickie, a partner at Insight Technology Group and a contributing editor for CRM Magazine, gave an overview of CRM’s annual state of the marketplace review at the Institute for International Research’s CRM Focus 2001 event in Boston. According to Dickie, increasing customer loyalty was the No. 1 goal of CRM projects, with more than 60% mentioning this as a top choice. More than half of all respondents also listed increasing service effectiveness and marketing effectiveness, while just under half wanted to use their CRM initiatives to provide current information to their customers.
Around one-third said they wanted to increase sales effectiveness, and more one in four wanted to use their eCRM projects to support channel partners.
At 10%, increasing revenue was at the bottom of all eCRM goals. The bottom three goals also included enhancing business-relationship management initiatives and decreasing costs.
Asked to rate the effectiveness of various functions on a scale of one to five, companies indicated their highest level of competence in configuring and submitting orders, with an average score of just under three. This was followed closely by the ability to generate proposals, a process electronic management can reduce from several days to several hours, according to Dickie. Servicing existing accounts and communicating sales management also ranked high.
At the other end of the spectrum, companies responded that their ability to share best practices could use some shoring up. This category generated an average score of just over two. Supporting channel partners and ramping up new sales representatives scored only slightly higher.
Respondents said that managing resistance to implementation was the single toughest challenge to successful eCRM implementation, with more than 45% choosing this as one of the top three headaches. This was followed by (in descending order) problems in defining system specifications; getting users productive; identifying process holes; and getting executive support.
