One of the most recurring myths in the history of business is that of resounding successes led by entrepreneurs and visionaries who were able to see what others couldn’t, and which are usually linked with the use of and trust in technological advances. Being able to take advantage of the possibilities that technique offers businesses before the competition can truly offer an advantage the market can appreciate.

Businesspeople now are very aware of it, to the point that use of and trust in technology has even been abused. It seems that with the simple acquisition of a tool, our problems will be solved. But that’s not true. One of the latest deceptions in this sense has been CRM. Spanish companies have invested more than 700 million euros in recent years in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. On average, 70% of them are resulting in complete and total failure after implementation.

In total, our country’s companies have invested more than 420 million euros; an amount that is transformed, in the majority of cases, into losses when the investing companies do not receive short-term results that allow them to make the most of said investments. A medium-to-large company (250 to 1,000 employees), with information on several dozen thousand customers, that is looking for an effective solution to loyalize those customers and get to know them better by using CRM, can invest between five and 10.2 million euros.

The big problem with CRM is that it stops halfway, and a multitude of companies that have invested millions in this software are finding this out. In today’s society, the excess of information is a growing problem for company directors, who find the task of decision-making and planning strategies made more difficult by the excessive volume of data and variables they must deal with. CRM only increases that “infoxication” more, without facilitating decision-making in any way.

The CRM solutions present on the market basically put the multitude of existing customer data in order, in such a way that from each customer, it is possible to obtain, as is the case with some banks, more than one thousand different pieces of information. But navigating that sea of data is extremely complicated. Very few are able to reach valid conclusions from that amalgam of information, such as properly segmenting their clientele or measuring sales results with respect to the potential market, evaluating sales network efficiency with respect to the competition, or preventing the risk of customer abandonment to the competition.

The deception experienced by most companies that have invested enormous time and Money in CRM solutions is in relation to the economic results that the providers on the market promised to obtain. When the world saw, years ago, the “boom” in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) business management solutions, the manufacturers of this type of software limited themselves to selling it and implementing it, promising greater efficiency in business management. None of them dared to guarantee direct and significant improvements in results. Unfortunately, this was not the case with CRM solutions, which were promoted by the software publishers as the panacea to heal companies’ economic problems and obtain big benefits in the short and mid-term.

Over time, not only have these performances not been realized, but the economic decrease in companies that bet everything on CRM is growing day by day. The majority of companies disappointed by these programs admit that they limited themselves to associating CRM with technology and with their companies’ systems and network managers. They ignored the essential fact that a CRM solution must involve every person who has responsibility over customers. In short, the success of a CRM program depends more on a good customer strategy than on the amount of money a company is willing to spend on software.

In this somber context, many companies are going a step further than CRM in order to apply what are known as “Customer Intelligence” techniques; that is, information analysis meant to offer conclusions that serve to make strategic decisions. 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.