Over the years we have heard a lot criticism of investments in two areas of information technology in particular: customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resources planning (ERP) softwares. Let us address only CRM in this article and how you can maximize the ROI on the CRM investment. (Related article: How to improve customer service using a formal customer relationship management program?)
Reasons why customer relationship management may not produce desired ROI
- Choosing the wrong CRM solution (either because of price or due to poor understanding of your needs and how they match with the software's capabilities)
- Lack of customization
- Not enough training to users (thus, lower adoption rates)
- Not using as recommended
- Not using enough
- Unless there is a technical problem with the specific piece of software installed in your business (and if you have bought from a leading CRM company like Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.), there is no reason to blame the vendor. CRM software is no longer a beta-stage product. It is fairly well-tested and used widely with most of the major bugs already worked out. So use it as recommended and make sure that you insist on your employees making it part of their work and you will see results.
- A software that is so broad in scope and affects so many departments in a company requires a change in culture. This can be accomplished by extensive training and implementation in stages. That way you will have enough time to ensure adoption and to train employees in proper use.
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