The CRM Blame Game

Where there is failure, there is usually blame… and the CRM market has seen plenty of both. The global CRM Software market worth a staggering US$10 Billion and the associated Consulting and Support market worth an indredible US$148 Billion. That's almost 15 times the cost of the software itself! So one can hardly be blamed from thinking that the promoters of CRM may have a vested interested in blaming anything else other than the software itself.

The reason why CRM Consulting and Support Services are SO expensive is that the larger more expensive systems are really no more than system development tools that require the skills of a Consultant with a high level of knowledge of both the tool being used and your business. Neither the level of skill required, nor the time involved to become familiar with your business come cheaply. This puts their cost well beyond the reach of small to medium sized businesses. Despite this at least 50% of such implementations still fail. WHY?

People Problems

Initially, CRM failure was explained away as nothing more than ‘misunderstandings’ – the user’s expectations were too high or the CRM vendor ‘oversold’ what the CRM system could achieve. However, it wasn’t long before the end user was considered the weak link in CRM deployment. The technology was fine – the problems lay with:

managers ramming through their CRM implementations without taking time up front to win employee support and
businesses failing to evaluate and change their processes and procedures to correspond with the capabilities of the CRM package¹.

Inevitably, deployment issues became the focus rather than the CRM software itself.

[1] Maselli J., People Problems, Information Week, 9 July 2001.