Customer Relationship Management

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to CRM Applications and Customer relationship management software and products. Providing timely customer contact information is vital to maintaining successful business environment. Accurate information provided in an organized and thoughtful manner is the key to any business success. TELEMATION, our CRM and contact center software, was built on this foundation. The ability to modify your Customer Relationship Management software is just as important in this ever changing business environment. Our customer contact management and CRM call center software was developed initially with this concept. Our Telemation Customer Relationship Management solution and contact center software is ideally suited for call centers throughout the world.

The following article relates to the CRM industry.

Risks

Biting-off-more-than–you-can-chew: Instead, start with smaller, more focused CRM solutions, targeting a specific sales or services business function or group of users.

Over Budget and behind schedule: According to CIO magazine, 49 percent of CRM projects are now targeted for completion in less than 12 months, and 70 percent within 18 months. Companies are significantly reducing project scope and implementing projects with tighter schedules and more reasonable budgets.(5)

Poor user adoption: Ease of use and training are essential for users to understand and adopt the solution.

Too-High Maintenance and Support: Maintaining CRM applications can be 40 percent of the original implementation’s labor and services. Weak or incomplete training almost always raises support costs.

Isolation: Failure to use CRM data across multiple groups can severely hamper the achievement of key benefits.

Garbage In/Garbage Out: Because CRM systems require so much data entry, users often put in placeholders, misguided estimates, or inaccurate information leading to poor analytical results and decision-making errors.

Who needs tangible results?: Lack of measurement is one of the clear ROI-killers for CRM. Measurement of pre-project estimates and post-project standings is essential for success.

Tom Pisello has been helping companies get more business value from IT investments for 15 years. He is founder and CEO of Alinean, which specializes in software, methodologies and tools for evaluating, presenting and measuring the value of IT investments through the use of benchmarking and ROI analysis.

Tom holds several software patents, is a regular contributor to many technology publications, is a featured speaker at major IT and management conferences, and has written several books on ROI and TCO analysis; his most recent is "IT Value Chain Management - Maximizing the ROI from IT Investments.”