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CRM Is Back On The "It" ListBy Tracey Schelmetic, Editorial Director, CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions You need only look at the news and articles that have appeared here on TMCnet for the last few days to realize that CRM is hot again. It's back on the "It" list, it's the equivalent of a blood orange cosmo to the cocktail bar set (mojitos and caipirhinas are so out, and green apple martinis are positive social suicide). A couple of headlines from TMCnet this week include: "Siebel On Demand CRM Business Growing," and "Analytical CRM Market To Hit $3 Billion By 2009." Salesforce.com is boasting of 15,500 customers as of right now, and that number seems to climb faster than the number on the national debt calculator in Times Square. So who said it was dead to begin with? Do a Google search on "CRM Failure" and you'll come up with over 600,000 search results, most of them from several years ago. Not only can you find a multitude of "reasons" and anecdotes about CRM failure, the analysts actually started contradicting each other as to why these failures were occurring. (Just for the record, Customer Interaction Solutions never declared CRM a failure. We just implied that the fault was with its users, not the software -- remember that great phrase "garbage-in-garbage-out"?) In 2001, Gartner issued a report that claimed that failure rates for CRM would reach somewhere around 80 percent by 2003, and then drop off to about 50 percent in the years following. Those conclusions still mystify me. "The Failure of CRM" was a chic topic to discuss while displaying your "Blackberry thumb" injuries and relishing gossip of Larry Ellison's latest PeopleSoft shenanigans. The true list of reasons for the perceived "failure" was long and complicated. First of all, how many of the companies that claimed their CRM failed actually knew how to measure success or failure in the first place? How can you know if you won the race when you never knew where the finish line was? Second, many companies didn't even know what they meant when they said "CRM." Was it just supposed to be glorified sales force automation? Was it online transactions only? Did it only happen in the call center? Finally, did these companies even bother to learn to use the systems properly? Did their back-office departments have the system thrust upon them with no input or explanation, and decide not to use it out of spite, or for fear it would make them obsolete? Did upper management expect they would "switch it on" and see cash come rolling through the door of corporate headquarters and become disappointed when the money bags failed to show up? There are many more possible reasons than these, but they are beyond the scope of this column. But now, once again, CRM is back in the business world's good graces. It never should have left, but we'll leave that topic alone now. What has given CRM its second wind? Just as with the perceived failures, it may be a multitude of reasons. My favorite explanation is the rise of on-demand CRM for a simple reason. On-demand CRM allows small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) implement CRM. Small companies implement CRM for different reasons than larger companies, in my estimation. Smaller companies want access to CRM because they know their businesses better, they know their people better, they have better cross-department communication and a less formal hierarchy, they know how to measure their success and they have more realistic expectations of what CRM can do for them and how they can best make it work. Huge enterprises implemented CRM for some less-than-logical reasons: the assumption of lightning-fast ROI with very little effort was perceived to have meant more and faster profits, more profits mean a happier board and stockholders, and a happier board and stockholders mean bigger bonuses in my pocket. What do we have to do to make this CRM stuff work? Well, that's not my problem. I'll dump it in the IT department's lap -- let them figure it out. After all, the brochures from the CRM vendor promised us we'd have two-fold ROI by next Tuesday before lunch and I, for one, plan to believe them. As the smaller companies are having notable successes with CRM, it's attracted the attention of larger enterprises that can presumably learn from their mistakes of the first round of CRM implementations. Vendors have been notably more realistic with their promises, and nowadays everybody's got a better idea of what "success" actually means in CRM. Now, if we could only once and for come up with a good definition of CRM, we'd be all set. Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles by Tracey Schelmetic, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100007&nm=Tracey%2 0E.%20Schelmetic |