A realistic approach to CRM

William Zarbock has 18 years experience implementing CRM systems and in his article, he uncovers some truths about CRM and its implementation. His conclusion is that when CRM fails in an organizational setting it is because it had already failed in the minds of management and the users. Why? Because of unrealistic expectations.

The excuses for failure are often things like lack of management support and overly large projects and, while some of these things, in individual settings, may border on the truth – the whole truth may be something else. What Zarbock refers to as “CRM realities” are the facts that:

• CRM solutions rarely either completely fail or completely succeed but have some degree of success while not meeting other expectations – expectations that may not be grounded in reality.
• Most salespeople, especially the best ones, do not like using CRM systems — perhaps they feel that using CRM is like “cheating.” If the users of any system don’t use the system it will have failed (because it was forced to fail).
• User adoption methods (“adoption hooks”) need to be built into the system or the users will either overtly or covertly reject it.

Every interaction with a customer is a form of CRM – Depending on the size of the company, CRM can work as an Excel spreadsheet as well as with a full blown CRM solution. The reality is, CRM is and has been a fact of life well before those three letters, C, R and M were assembled to mean Customer Relationship Management. The biggest benefits from CRM may take longer than expected – there may well be some immediate benefit but time will tell the whole story. Installing a CRM solution and getting the users to use it is not the end of the effort. The CRM solution needs to change as your customer base changes and needs to adapt to your growth, your successes and your failures (may they be few).