Money in, service out. Right?

Customer relationship management (CRM), its proponents tell ITWeb, has moved through its first, heady, post-launch wave, its second, crammed-with-functionality wave, and has now entered a more mature third wave. This third wave of CRM systems, the vendors say, is more user-friendly and people-focused than previous iterations.

Emphasis has been given to removing unnecessary functionality, for example. Open standards and integration have also been given due consideration. Moreover, these systems are easier to implement and within far shorter periods than earlier versions. CRM, we are led to believe, is finally ready to deliver what it has long promised.

South African consumers, by and large, have no interest in CRM and have long been waiting for customer service. Any customer service will do, although good customer service would be better. That all the money spent on CRM to date has not delivered this Holy Grail is a result of several factors.

Today's CRM systems are more than capable of providing all the functionality needed to enable solid, if not scintillating, customer service. The disconnect, it seems, is in the R: relationship/s. What the organisations forking out for CRM are failing to consider, it seems, is the people.

Says Accenture SA CRM lead Nikki Tyrer: "For a large number of organisations, and certainly those in the service environment, the experience a customer has is more likely to be driven by the relationship they have with your people than your technology. People, however, are often last on the list when companies look at improving customer service; they're not fancy enough. When we do projects, often the first thing companies look to cut is the people side - training, change management and so on."

Further, as Keith Fenner, strategic sales director at Softline Accpac, notes: "Many companies don't ask their customers how they want to be interacted with." Even fewer, it seems, ask customers what it is that they want.

"You need to understand what your customers expect from you as an organisation, both in terms of products and services," says Paul Bornhutter, FrontRange product GM for Africa. "Only then can you adopt CRM strategies and technology."

You need to understand what your customers expect.

Paul Bornhutter, product GM for Africa, FrontRange

Companies also need to shift from viewing customers as 'have to' and rather see them as 'want to', Bornhutter adds.

True customer-centricity is an attitude and a culture that permeates an organisation from the top down and across all operational divisions. CRM is not about the tech; it's about the people - customers, suppliers and employees. People may be seen as the soft side, but people are those bits in any system that actually have relationships. Neglect the people side of CRM and your implementation is bound to fail.

A frequent cause of frustration for customers forced to deal with call centres, aside from the atrocious hold music, is the need to continuously repeat their details while being transferred from pillar to post and back again.

"One of the big issues," notes Dave Paulding, regional sales manager for UK and Africa for Interactive Intelligence, "is that companies buy into CRM as the solution to all customer service problems. They buy the system, then don't implement it with any strategy in mind and don't integrate it with things like the call centre."

Or the billing system, or the dispatch department, or other crucial systems... Organisations also frequently implement systems without consulting the affected departments about how it is they prefer to work, and what information each needs to have to be able to effectively deal with customer queries.

"Turnaround is often lacking because companies do not discuss how departments will share customer information; departments do not understand each other's processes," notes Bornhutter.

Companies don't implement [CRM] with any strategy in mind.

Dave Paulding, regional sales manager, Interactive Intelligence

As Accenture's Tyrer notes: "One of the challenges companies often face is that people tend to think of CRM in distinct silo fashion. Rather than thinking of the customer as an individual who needs one, holistic experience, companies tend to impose the organisation's structured, silo view on the customer. The IT department will be looking at the latest technology it can implement, while at same time, the marketing department is looking at new branding, the supply chain or procurement organisation will have a totally different view of how they can add value to the customer experience.

"These things tend to happen totally independently of each other. So while everyone in the company thinks they are doing CRM and actively working to improve the customer experience, since they don't work in integrated fashion, you get a very disparate view. Often, the channels to the customer are owned by a different department (like the call centre). IT tends to want to buy the latest fancy application, but they don't necessarily internalise or spend time with the business to fully understand what it wants."

A further problem, says Bornhutter, is that organisations tend to want to implement CRM from start to finish in one big bang.

"Companies don't chew on it. They don't consult anyone [internally]; they don't speak to customers about their requirements. They don't know what the departure point should be. They don't ask, 'Do we have any kind of metric to measure success later? Can we quantify why we need it? What's the strategy? What's our CRM philosophy?'."

It's almost impossible to integrate all of a company's systems. But it is possible to integrate them on a visual level.

Glen Ansell, CEO, i5

Says IS Partners' CRM director Heath Turner: "For us, the first siren goes off when we get pulled in by an IT person saying, 'We're doing CRM this year.' We ask them what that means to them and the response is that they need to get it done.

"There needs to be some business strategy in terms of what the organisation is trying to achieve. There also needs to be a commitment from the top down. There also needs to be a bottom-up approach - look at the user, understand the way they work and what they need to do. Remove all unnecessary functionality and involve the users so that they have a workable solution in place."

Turner concurs that the big bang approach was responsible for a lot of failed implementations in the past.

"If you do an 18-month project, by the end of it, the business has changed, people have left, etc. Rather break it into smaller projects, but don't lose sight of the larger plan. By doing three three-month implementations, for example, you will be able to use the lessons learned in project one when you implement project two rather than going too far down the road to be able to change it, or it fails. This route also lets you gain momentum in terms of support. People in division B who see a successful implementation in division A will be more prone to use the system when they get it."

Organisations are saying that service is critically important, but that they are not prepared to spend more money.

Evan Jones, service and solutions manager, Merchants

Consensus is that integrating the wide variety of disparate systems found in most corporates would be a mammoth exercise, taking too much time or money to be do-able in one fell swoop. That said, for organisations to realise value, if only from the six different CRM systems they may have, they need to tie them together.

Says i5 CEO Glen Ansell: "It's almost impossible to integrate all of a company's systems. But it is possible to integrate them on a visual level."

He refers to tools that pull data from disparate systems and display them visually within a single window.

"After that, you can start chipping away at integration. Start with CRM, then move onto other systems without losing business time."

Says Evan Jones, service and solutions manager at Merchants: "There are products available that sit on top of your applications and intelligently pull information at the right time out of all the applications at the point of interaction. Organisations are saying that service is critically important, but that they are not prepared to spend more money. They are, however, willing to invest a little extra to get a return on existing infrastructure."

Thanks to the Internet, there is a new breed of consumers who are more educated and have more choice in terms of service providers. Organisations have suddenly realised that customer service has to become a strategic priority; lip-service and technology will no longer suffice.

As Jones notes, few are willing to invest in new systems. Tools such as those mentioned above may hold some of the answers. The other part lies in embedding a sincere culture of putting the customer first.

Given SA's history of atrocious service, this change is not going to be easy or fast, but it is something that every organisation's continued existence will depend on.