Best Practices: Getting The Most From Your CRM Deployment

By 2010, enterprises will spend nearly $11 billion annually on customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to accelerate top-line growth, improve the customer experience, and boost the productivity of frontline workers. But success with CRM can be elusive. Less than 50% of the executives we spoke with are fully satisfied that the business benefits of CRM have met or exceeded their expectations. Forrester interviewed 58 business and IT executives to uncover best practices for wringing more value from CRM deployments. Successful companies focus on five fundamentals: promoting user adoption, focusing on business processes, establishing executive sponsorship, practicing sound customer data management, and defining the right metrics. Attention to discipline in execution is what sets CRM winners apart from the well-publicized failures.