Barriers to implementing CRM

Q. (Also posted in My-RealProperty1)
List out the barriers in implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

A.
Firstly, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, not Customer Relationship Marketing.

However, some people use these two terms interchangeably. I personally do not agree. CRM is a management tool. It is a method. Relationship Marketing is not a tool, it is a concept.

8 barriers to success in CRM software.

In summary, the barriers are:

1. Problems with Integration and Adaptability. No company is the same.
2. Resistance to Change.
3. Failure to See Benefits.
4. Lack of Guidance or Leadership.
5. Low Skill Level.
6. Lack of Accountability.
7. Using the Wrong System.
8. Terrible Data. 

The above article is about barriers in implementing CRM Software. CRM can also be a manual system. It is however, synonymous with a data base organiser which communicate periodically with the customers.

Hence, the issue is what data base, and for what effective outcome. Be it software or manual system, the end objective is to establish a good relationship with the customers, based on the data of these people.

To illustrate this point, what is data? We use a scenario to illustrate this. Data of patient age group. Selling a medication to patients who requires weight management/weight loss programme, for example.

Barrier would be:

Sales team does not only see that age group. There are people outside the age group who are being sold the weight loss programme. So, the data will be useless as these out of range data are not captured in the CRM data base.

But, to a salesperson, any potential consumer of the weight loss product is a customer, irrespective of the age. Thus, the salesperson might not rely on the Data from CRM at all. The new customer is not being included into the data base, although being captured as a sales. Even when the programme is successful in other age group, it is not entered into the CRM.

By right, this out of range age group should be told to the management and leadership decision should be sorted out and create a new age group in the CRM. Though key to the success of the CRM system, this is a trivial issue to the sales team. As they don't see this as impacting their sales, hence they might not even bring this up to the higher management.

Over time when the sales team does not see the usefulness of the system. They would not be interested to input the data into the CRM system anyway. It only add more work for them. Then, the system is not reflective of the composition of customer base. Thereafter, the data become obsolete.

In the above example, you can see the barriers involved are:

1. Problems with Integration and Adaptability - new CRM system not reflective of the ground issue that other age group are also customers.
2. Resistance to Change - the sales team resisted to implement CRM effectively.
3. Failure to See Benefits - the sales team did not see the benefit of sending messages to potential clients. They rely on their personal skill in calling on the prospects.
4. Lack of Guidance or Leadership - CRM is not being implemented collectively because the leader in the sales team did not work together with the staff of CRM. They did not address the out of age group issue in the deployment of the CRM system.
5. Low Skill Level - obviously sales team is not computer system specialist who can alter the CRM system.
6. Terrible Data - over time, the CRM data is not reflective of the actual ground level customer base.

It is indeed a tremendous effort to run a successful CRM system in some industries. Especially industry where product is distinct and customer base is limited defined.

For, you have such a well defined customer base, it is so limited in number, therefore the purpose for CRM is minimum. Example of this type of industry is high-tech highly specialist product like selling heavy machineries or MRI machines.

CRM is good for fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) with wide base of customer. Then, they can capture wide range of customer behaviours and streamline them to achieve more focus promotion over a longer period.

In industry where repeat sales is very uncommon, CRM is also not very effective. You would not expect the same purchaser of property will purchase in next 12 months. This can be intergration or adaptability barrier.

Ref:
Own account.
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