Research house Gartner reports that businesses are finally seeing CRM as a business rather than an IT issue.
Gartner says recent international research has found that CRM is the third most important business priority, behind budget pressures and improvements in stakeholder returns. In contrast, CRM trails in ninth place on the IT agenda.
However, economic conditions, unmet expectations from past projects and the need to demonstrate short-term business value are putting CRM technology projects on the backburner.
"In 2001 we reported on the rising number of failed CRM projects," says Ed Thompson, research director at Gartner. "This year we are seeing the impact of much soul-searching among companies in light of this failure and tougher economic conditions. As a result, we see less immediate investments in CRM technology and implementation, but a greater focus on other aspects of CRM."
He says companies have been forced to rethink what they are trying to achieve with CRM and have realised that they cannot only have a technology approach to CRM.
The South African market experienced similar CRM trends over the last three years. Andries Treurnicht of BoE bank, who conducted research on the success rate of CRM as business strategy in the South African market last year, says the implementation of CRM generated limited results.
His study, focusing predominantly on the financial services industry, was exploratory in nature and dealt with two study groups consisting of 64 CRM consultants and 84 employees from corporate companies.
"Small pockets of success were identified in some cases. Of significance, was the high percentage of companies that believed CRM strategies had resulted in limited change to their businesses," says Treurnicht.
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