Many companies complain about the lack of measurable return on their CRM investment. In a way, it's not surprising: very few of them even have a useful measurement system in place. DMR Consulting (to be known as Fujitsu Consulting from April) has just released the results of a survey of 219 IT professionals.
Findings
In addition to the lack of useful measurement systems, it was revealed that:
· Companies are much more likely to achieve key strategic goals for their CRM initiatives if they include all three functions of sales, marketing and customer service in the initiative. They are less likely to be successful if they target just one or two of these functions.
· If one person in a company is in charge of corporate-wide CRM initiatives, the company is further advanced in developing a single CRM technology architecture.
· CRM initiatives are no guarantee of being customer-centric. Almost two thirds of companies that had already completed CRM initiatives were no closer to being customer-centric than they were beforehand. Companies that were already customer-centric were more successful in implementing CRM than others: these companies met 71% of their implementation goals while the others met 53%.
· Measurements of CRM are not widely used: 56% of companies made no measurements and just 22% made only some measurements. And according to David Yamashita, DMR Consulting's CRM Practice Director, "Employing meaningful metrics is essential to evaluating how well your CRM efforts are paying off. Understanding whether you are actually achieving the measurable benefits you targeted when planning your CRM programme enables you to make informed, proactive changes to that programme over time."
The people surveyed were directors or managers of IT departments (50%), VPs or CIOs (18%), IT professionals (13%) and heads of other specific functions, for example CRM directors (19%).
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