Why do CRMs implementations fail?
Implementing a successful Customer Relationship Management system can have many benefits for your organisation, making your processes, more efficiently integrate teams across your business and sharpen your sales & marketing activities. For anyone who has spent any length of time in any business, it is likely that you will have been involved in the implementation of a new CRM and if you are unlucky, you may have been involved in more than one.
According to research from the Merkle Research Group, as many as 63% of CRM projects fail.
Implementing a successful CRM takes a huge amount of effort by the business to ensure that they add value. Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways that they can fail.
If CRMs are central to success for most businesses, why do so many projects fail?
Here are five reasons why this happens:
1. Not grasping the impact of the CRM on the business
A CRM is not an add-on feature; it sits at the centre of the business. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t appreciate how much change to the business the CRM will have on it and the sheer amount of resource that will need to be directed to introducing it. It will change many of the business processes and relationships between internal teams. If the business is unwilling to accept the impact on their operations, then the CRM implementation is very likely to fail.
2. Lack of effective planning
Given the impact of the CRM within the business the CRM requires attention to detail and proper planning. However, in many cases, a CRM system is purchased first, and staff are expected to figure it out on the job with very analysis. Or an underestimate of the effort involved results in a half-hearted set-up.
This will lead to frustration among users’ incomplete data collection. As a result, the CRM will be perceived as adding very little value to their jobs and so they will stop using or updating it. The CRM soon gets dropped and the business is back to Square One.
3. No Buy-in at board level
CRMS are so strategic and their importance to the business is so fundamental that it is essential to have Board Level approval and a C Level executive sponsoring it. A common reason that CRM projects don’t get embedded in an organisation is that it doesn’t have full executive support. Without it is typical for the CRM project to not get completed. The Board will need to allocate energy and resources to ensure that the teams work together.
4. No clear strategy for the CRM
For the CRM technology to be effective it needs to have a clear strategy and goals that the CRM to solve problems for the business. You need a strategy.
It also needs to have a set of processes which the CRM is built around a set of processes within the business. The CRM should not be the vehicle for trying to create those processes. The CRM should be servant of your strategy and not driving it.
5. Top-down implementation: your users are not involved
Your team is going to need to use it and see the benefits of the CRM. The planning and implementation team should include representatives from all areas of the business.
Consider having CRM champions in the teams that will be using the CRM most often.
Your users have detailed knowledge of your customers and processes and will help to ensure the CRM is tailored to your business needs. If the CRM is imposed without user involvement, those users will be unwilling to adopt it. The CRM will gradually stop being used or updated and will eventually be abando
Take-aways
To summarise, most of the reasons why CRMS fail, occur long before you implement it on site. They can be summarised as:
Lack of strategy: Be clear about why you want a CRM and how you see it drive benefits into your organisation.
Lack of commitment: You’ll need an executive with enough seniority to deliver the project across the organisation and make sure your implementation team includes day to day users of the CRM.
Lack of planning: ensure that you understand the resources that you need to implement the CRM and factor this into work schedules, especially for those who will be part of your project team.