Why CRM Installations fail

Walter Janowski said too many corporate enterprises continue to take an ad-hoc approach to CRM that doesn't involve key departments or take into consideration customer expectations. - Shane Schick, Issue: Sept 21, 2001 Computing Canada

What we find is that most companies don't look at CRM as an actual project, but more of a task that can be done in a day, or something that can be done on the cheap. This is the biggest mistake a company can make. A company wouldn't implement a CRM like SIEBEL in a day and/or by themselves. A proper GoldMine implementation takes planning, meetings to gather valuable information, and coordination between sales, IT and other departments.

Other things need to be taken into consideration such as customizations, existing data to import, synchronization settings, and security. Just recently here in Atlanta, a disgruntled ex-employee was arrested in an FBI sting for trying to sell his ex-employers entire customer database for $20,000. Yet, we see self-installations left wide open for entire database theft or deletion all the time.

Synchronization is another component that we see critical mistakes being made. FrontRange requires its partners to have various certifications including one that focuses on synchronization configuration. We see very talented certified network engineers make multiple mistakes in the configuration of synchronization that, in time, leads to corrupted data and potentially software failure.

No implementation should be considered complete until after all of the users have been trained properly and are using the software; yet training is probably one of the most overlooked stages of the project.

Statistics show that employees who are properly trained are happier and more productive in their jobs. Lack of training creates a larger learning curve; slower implementation and almost a 100% guarantee that they use the product incorrectly. This has a direct adverse effect on the results that gave you the reason to buy the product in the first place: making it, for-the-most-part, worthless. Garbage in, garbage out.

"The one thing worse than training your employees and losing them, is not training and keeping them".