“That’s it. I can’t take one more argument with the customer service girl. It’s been months of fights and excuses. I can’t stand feeling badly treated and misunderstood if I’m paying for a service. I’ve explained a thousand times what I need, and they ignore me. Today, I left my telephone company for another one.”
This is a CRM victim’s story. A successful small businessman who one year ago signed a contract for a service package for pymes from a well-known telephone company: voice and information. Since then, the failures have multiplied. The ADSL line constantly goes down, the Internet site is a disaster, the operator’s customer service never transmits the customer’s complaint to the salespeople and, when they come to visit, they don’t even know who their customer is. Our small businessman didn’t want to change providers, but the poor service he received forced him to. That happens too often, don’t you think?
This is also the store of poor customer management. A management focused on technology and not on the human factor. Our well-known operator has a “CRM” that they paid millions of euros for, and which took almost two years to implement. They invested so much time and money in this software that, in order to justify it, they ended up giving it all the importance in the relationship with their customers.
In recent years, all of its competitors had undertaken complex CRM solutions, so our operator wasn’t going to be left behind. Who can claim to be international and competitive without it? C.R.M.: these three fashionable letters.
Imported directly from the United Status, the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) means the management of the relationship with customers. The majority of times, behind these letters lies only an IT solution, meant to gather customer information spread out all over a company.
That whole amalgam of data, from any corner or a company – from the call center to the financial department, passing through marketing or the sales network- , is neatly ordered in modern databases, and they are supposedly ready to be used to the benefit of the company and its customers.
Only three years ago, when the world’s most important companies began to implement CRM solutions, the expectations were enormous. It was thought that these miraculous programs would put an end to the headache of trying to know customers in-depth, give them exactly what they want, loyalize them, take them from the competition, and gain market share. Over time, the euphoria has drastically grown cold. Many companies have wasted millions and time on software solutions that, in the best case scenario, have not optimized customer management in the least, and in the worst cases, have not even worked.
A recent study shows this reality. It was carried out by the American consulting firm Nucleus Research (www.nucleusresearch.com), by means of interviews with more than 20 of the customers that Siebel – one of the worldwide leaders in CRM – exhibited as successful cases on its web site. 61% of them said they had received a negative return on investment from their CRM, with an average cost of $18,000 per user. Do the math on the investment, keeping in mind that the majority of companies that implement CRM solutions do it to be used by hundreds, if not thousands, of workers. In Spain, according to a recent report from IDC consulting firm, 60% of CRM projects bring no results.
Why so much failure? Let’s go back to our upset small businessman. His operator has the latest CRM model. It has enviable databases which contain the histories of all of its customers, duly itemized. But it suffers a serious problem: it accumulates information and lacks knowledge. It has unrelated coordinates about its customers, but it has not traced the route to get to them. It contains a diamond that it has not been able to polish.
CRM is only technology. It is very useful software, but it is still only software. Without a previously defined customer strategy, without involving the entire company in this strategy and not just the systems department, without knowing who our customers are and what they want, without determining how they behave with their provider, there is no IT program, as expensive and sophisticated as it may be, that makes us sell more and better. And whoever says otherwise is simply lying.