A Brief History of CRM

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a term coined in the 1990’s to describe a system whereby every contact with a customer could be recorded and analysed. Like many buzzwords, the term CRM now stand for pretty well whatever each vendor of CRM systems wants it to, whether it is systems for sales people (Sales Force Automation, Opportunity Management), for marketing people (Marketing Automation, Campaign Management), Helpdesks (Customer Service and Support), email and voice logging, and so on.

The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers.

This is as good a definition as any. CRM systems were the must-have products at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000/2001. There followed a few years of disillusionment as expensive systems were late and then failed to deliver the results to meet the raised expectations of the users. The Gartner Group, a US firm of analysts, have a Hype Cycle graph showing the traditional pattern of a slow start, followed by unjustified euphoria, down to disillusionment and back to a level of realisable sanity. Which is where we are today, at last.

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Starting Out

True Customer Relationship Management in it’s original meaning is not about software or systems, its about the way a company interacts with its customers through its people and its culture. No computer system will change the way people interact with customers, it can at best simply help them do what they want to do more efficiently.

But assuming that your sales, service, delivery and support people are competent and treat customers like customers, a properly chosen and implemented CRM system will bring sales and service efficiencies to your organisation.
Whatever your goal, there are fundamental factors that will be critical to the success of your CRM system. Broadly speaking these can be divided into getting the design right, choosing the right system, getting the adoption right and avoiding the pitfalls.

10 Critical Factors in Choosing a CRM

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A six-part blog about how many CRM implementations go wrong because implementers fall into the same common traps. This Guide lists the ten most common pitfalls, and how you can avoid them.
• Part 1 – A Brief History of CRM
• Part 2 – Divided into Getting the Design Right,
• Part 3 – Choosing the Right System,
• Part 4 – Cloud v Local Application
• Part 5. Getting the Adoption Right, and
• Part 6. Avoiding the Pitfalls ,

This guide will show you how to make sure that your CRM system will be a success, based on real life experience.
Knowing what the pitfalls are is more than half the battle.

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