That’s a bold claim perhaps. But if new software poured out of the
box like Saturday morning breakfast cereal – golden, abundant and sweet
– we wouldn’t need in-house IT people or vendor engineering teams to
install it, to integrate it with existing systems, and to tweak it
repeatedly after install.
Consider this story:
I’d be very curious to learn what kind of CRM
system Dell is using (or not using), and why it seems to be neglecting
the very basic functionality of tracking all customer interaction in a
single location. IT might not matter in a world where everyone is using
it properly, but if CRM can go so badly used or unused in 2006, IT still offers plenty of competitive advantage in my book. Dell Missing CRM?
It would be useful to know Dell’s side of
this story. Dell’s phenomenal history of growth must also involve a
trail of IT headaches during the course of its scaling up. But, we
agree with the main point here, that IT is needed in a software
deployment- we’re just not surprised.
There is a great temptation for the enterprise – and even the vendors to a degree – to regard CRM as a bolt-on solution.
You’ve heard the stories about a company buying a CRM
software package and then realizing it hasn’t really changed anything.
The big-wigs are disappointed, customer service is frustrated, and the
clients are aggravated with the new changes that don’t seem to show any
improvements in customer service or client relations.[...] You should
have a very specific, well-defined objective that your CRM
software solution can address, and you company should have developed a
formal objective before you went shopping for a solution. – Why does CRM software fail so often after it’s put into place?
This sounds like CRM 101,
but it’s not so easy sometimes. Many of the changes in process that
agents and departments find they want to make only come to light as
they get used to a new deployment. Progress is a continuing rollout.
At Dovetail, we create upfront the customer’s goal in the implementation, and then we measure it afterwards. But still, it’s a feature of CRM, not a bug, that deployment is an ongoing thing.
Enterprises
could avoid thinking in terms of “rip and replace” with systems, and
instead perhaps look for the most flexible integrations and
enhancements they can find or create: flexibility in this case
referring to vendor culture as well as codebase.
Over time we’ll talk about Dovetail’s legendary ease of integration.
