Improving CRM Implementation Efforts

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

In a recent report from New York-based research firm, Datamonitor, called "Great Expectations But Not-So-Great Implementation: CRM in the Pharmaceutical Industry," the firm states "44 percent of pharmaceutical CRM projects either fail to meet implementation timescales or result in total project failure, a trend that is set to continue." The report cites organizational resistance and cost as the greatest barriers to successful CRM implementation.

And according to Jim Ericson, in another article published at www.Line56.com, those failure rates could be as high as 70 percent. (source of data quoted: Gartner Group and Meta Group)

Whether it's resistance to change, poor planning or just reckless abandon, the message is clear: The majority of CRM efforts are NOT delivering value to customers, organizations or owners.

Being a Process Improvement zealot, I of course have been watching CRM and have developed my own theories as to why failure occurs so often.

The driving reason why CRM efforts fail is that they are not strategic in their approach. More often than not these efforts are focused on reducing the cost to service customers rather than improving the value delivered to them.

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