CRM: The discussion
How do you define CRM?
- Vic Guerrieri, vice president of sales at Remedy: The art of creating e-dialogues.
- Jim Goldfinger, vice president of CRM strategy at PeopleSoft: Managing profitable relationships.
- Jon Wurfl, director of CRM communications at SAP: Sensing and responding to customers in real-time.
- John O'Connell, chairman and CEO of Staffware: It's a business approach that builds customer loyalty and retention.
- Margaret Gerstenkorn, business development associate at Oncontact Software: Conquering barriers that prevent customers and companies from knowing each other.
- Barton Goldenberg, founder and president of ISM: Our industry has not done a good enough job to make that value proposition clear. I define CRM as a business approach that integrates PPT [people, process and technology] to maximise relations with all customers. It's not a one-off, but a complete approach that coordinates customer-facing operations like sales, marketing, customer service. It should help sales, raise productivity, improve employee morale.
The biggest issue that CRM customers are concerned about is the failure of CRM implementations, and return on investment. How do you define failure of implementation?
- O'Connell: It's the inability to achieve measurable business benefits. In that sense, we're in danger of emulating the ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] market. It's sometimes oversold, overambitious.
Is it unrealistic expectations?
- Alan Goldsworthy, president and CEO of Applix: It's not that simplistic. People expect functionality. Failure occurs when business processes don't align with functionality. Implementation helps because you discover problems in business processes.
What can you do to prevent failures?
- Goldfinger: We're a little guilty as vendors. We don't always see that as our responsibility. Sometimes we think that's their responsibility in their role as consultants and systems integrators. Vendors can't force management to take ownership of a project. We can maximise their chance of success.
- Guerrieri: It takes a passionate executive. We've been successful when we have a backer in the customer.
- Valerie Doyle, senior director of product marketing at Nortel Networks: There's a post-implementation strategy: What do we do to help after the sale?
- Goldsworthy: We see a lot of CRM deployments fail because they forced companies to define the process too early. The entire deployment methodology needs to change when a company changes. We have one customer that when we started out was a US$36 million company. It just recorded US$108 million in revenues in 2000. Everything we did is no longer as usable. You have to adapt the software.
- Goldfinger: It takes user buy-in. You're constantly selling. There's this feeling that once we've negotiated it and implemented it, and the calls come in, we've got it won. That's not the case.
- Gerstenkorn: We agree. References are a huge issue in building trust. If users don't hear that someone else has a good experience with a product, they'll have doubts.
