But a lot of people put the failure of CRM implementations down to issues around company culture, specifically sales culture, rather than problems with the technology itself?
I'm not sure that's true. I don't want to get into a religious war about whether it's technology or not technology but what I don't think people sat there and asked: "Right I am going to be an operative in a call centre using the CRM system today -- what do I have to do?" If you actually approach some of those CRM systems in that way it's easy to see why some of the ROI isn't being delivered.
The industry needs to focus on making sure its delivering real benefits to the customers. A company buys in a big CRM system for millions of dollars and ends up employing lots of people to take in all the information coming from customers, emails and phone calls and so on, and enter it into forms at the front of the CRM system. By the time you take that cost into account you wipe out the ROI.
Or you've got a supply-chain management system that looks great until you realise every so often an order has something written on it in pencil -- like make sure these screws aren't magnetised -- and the cost of dealing with that one order actually destroys the savings on the ten other orders that have gone through. There's often no way of dealing with that information in a supply-chain management system
So what's the solution?
A lot of it is about going back to first principles and actually listening to customers. A lot of this is about not understanding the information inside companies and the other is the whole problem of computer systems. What you've got inside a modern enterprise looks like a spaghetti rat's-nest of different apps taking data from each other and all trying to be connected. What that means is that as soon as anything goes wrong or changes you have to get loads of consultants in and there is this explosion of complexity. What we have to do is make sure that the industry sees this as a problem. So if the server goes down -- the software just keeps going on another server.
There's a lot of work in what's called self-aware software. You'd be surprised how many enterprise systems just fall over if the disk gets full. A self-aware system realises the disk is getting full, obviously tries to tell someone, but if the situation doesn't get any better makes alternative arrangements. I think the IT industry has almost been in a conspiracy not to face this problem because at the end of the day it means you've got more billable hours if you have to go in and sort it out. I think we, as an industry, have to face that that's not the way to treat customers.
