CRM Best Practices Adoption

Organizations continue to spend heavily on customer relationship management (CRM) — $11 billion annually by 2010 — to grow the top line, improve the customer experience, and boost the productivity of customer-facing workers. To better understand how enterprises can get the most value from this investment, we surveyed 260 business and technology decision-makers and influencers to discover their strengths and weaknesses in adopting 11 sets of CRM capabilities consisting of 150 best practices. We found that adopting CRM best practices is a big challenge for many organizations. A significant percentage of the executives surveyed evaluate their capabilities to be poor/below average for all categories: 1) marketing — 37%; 2) customer analytics — 36%; 3) customer service — 35%; 4) indirect sales — 33%; 5) customer data management — 31%; 6) eCommerce — 30%; 7) customer strategy — 25%; 8) technology infrastructure — 23%; 9) field service — 22%; 10) people management — 20%; and 11) direct sales — 17%. Disappointment with CRM is usually the result of poorly conceived strategies that lack a laser focus on improving a specific set of business capabilities to increase revenues or reduce costs. How well does your organization stack up? Compare your organization to CRM best practices, pinpoint the best opportunities for quick wins, and build an action plan to close the gaps.