Customer Relationship Management Systems Not Universal
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Jan 15, 2010
I often make the assumption when discussing panel management and enterprise feedback management that every organization already has a customer-relationship management system. In fact, my assumption is so ingrained I even use an analogy: "Just as ten years ago, before you adopted CRM, you had customer data scattered in many separate systems, today you have survey data in many separate systems. EFM is the CRM of survey data." Yet, in fact, many organizations do not have centralized CRM systems.
John Moore, the CTO of Swimfish, recently conducted an informal poll about 2010 CRM deployments, which reminded me that many firms are laggards when it comes to CRM adoption. John's survey, a convenience sample of readers of his blog, can't be used to generalize to the wider market, but it does provide further evidence that traditional CRM still has untapped markets to reach. Only 8% of the respondents had CRM (most who had CRM probably ignored the survey invitation, since it focused on deployment), 40% were planning CRM for 2010, 47% had no plans and 5% asked, "What's CRM?" Plenty of room for further adoption and for continued education of the market.
Bloggers and analysts will often talk about the growth opportunities for social CRM and for adding more applications into your CRM ecosystem. This is great advice for organizations that are already realizing a strategic benefit from their CRM systems. But too many organizations today do not have CRM at all but have customer data in their accounting software, their SFA (Sales Force Automation) systems (individual sales people sometimes even use their own packages), their email marketing applications and, yes, even their survey tools.
If your organization does not yet have CRM, the first step is to deploy a central repository of customer data, integrating it with your existing systems. Your CRM system then becomes a hub of customer data, providing you one place to view all the information you have about specific customers. In our research into customer-experience management best practices that build customer loyalty, implementing a standard CRM system across the organization had a 0.47 positive correlation to loyalty.
Deploying a CRM system in 2010 establishes a firm foundation for enhancing your customer experience and for building customer loyalty. Take that first step! Then, come 2011, I'll bug you about adopting an EFM system to truly enhance it.