Rethinking CRM

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 June of 2002, I wrote an article entitled “Improving CRM Implementation Efforts”. In that article, I shared my assessment of why so many Customer Relationship Management initiatives fail:

“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.”

It is now 12 years later, and unfortunately it appears that not much has changed in regard to CRM success. Despite the advances in data analytics, predictive modeling and Big Data mining, the harsh reality is that the drivers of CRM have essentially remained unchanged. Over the years, CRM initiative failure rates have been monitored by organizations like Gartner, Forester, AMR and IDC as depicted in the adjacent graph. And while in 2005 it appeared that CRM had turned the corner, the failure rate has been increasing toward its 2001/2002 high points.

As we approach the halfway mark of the new millennium’s second decade, isn’t it time to rethink customer relationship management? I believe the answer is “yes”! So what’s the solution? How can organizations rethink their approaches to CRM, and how they deliver the value customers want in the way they want it?

As in most rethinking and …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.