Computerworld - Doug Tanoury is a customer relationship management consultant (CRM) and contributed this piece to the Computerworld Community. He can be reached at dtanoury1@home.com. If you have an opinion about CRM, you can share it in our CRM forums.
Despite its vast potential, for the majority of practitioners, CRM has yet to live up to its greatest promise: the ability to decisively and dramatically improve the performance of staffers so they can do what they do better.
It's that qualitative and quantitative improvement in human performance that is the most desired and fundamental benefit of any CRM initiative. Unfortunately, for many companies that spend many millions of dollars to deploy CRM across the enterprise, it remains a benefit unrealized.
More often than not, human performance and customer interactions are hindered by the rigidity and poor design of CRM systems. These flaws aren't necessarily software-related; rather, design and customization for a client's specific business processes and unique business needs may not fit that business. Deploying a CRM system with standard or "out-of-the-box" applications and attempting to change business processes to conform to that functionality is pushing a square peg into a round hole. The business is damaged, and customers aren't better served.
Deploying a CRM system without a plan to improve and to re-engineer the business process is just another quick fix that will hinder the potential of the CRM implementation and cause more problems further down the line.
CRM at its best allows staff to perform at levels they wouldn't be able to perform at without the system. It's an enabling tool to allow people to work smarter and faster. It facilitates the interaction of staff with customers by providing specific product data and critical customer information at the most important junctures of contact.
However, many CRM implementations are excessively self-serving to the organizations that deploy them and lack a real outward customer focus. These implementations are easy to spot -- they are preoccupied with generating a million management reports and capturing information of dubious value that has no real effect on human performance and subsequently customer contact quality.
They also focus on automating workflow and tasks that don't impact the quality of customer contacts.
Getting the correct information to the right person at the required time is at the heart of improving human performance with CRM systems. Simply deploying a product and touching a few problem processes in a superficial way doesn't achieve this. Success requires significant and ongoing resources to populate and update knowledge tools. It also requires in-depth
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