Report reveals businesses are still struggling to get to grips with CRM

Findings from the Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2003

Despite major investments in customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, organisations are still struggling with the fundamentals of managing their customer relationships, according to findings in a new report from Dimension Data, which surveyed over 200 contact centres across the world.

The Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report revealed that more than 75% of call centres still claim not to have achieved the holy grail of a "single view of their customers" across all touch-points.

Significantly it is company culture and not technology that appears to be holding back the success of CRM projects. Over 70% of call centres cited the issue of "co-ordinating across departments" as a major stumbling block, which is almost double the 37% who were concerned with "integrating the technology with legacy systems". The problems of "data integration" and "training call centre agents" were both also stated as outstanding hurdles that still needed to be overcome.

Only 21% of call centres have made the transition to "profit centres", a decline from 23% of those surveyed in 2001. This would reflect the findings that many organisations are struggling to put in place the basic building blocks of creating a single customer database and data integration. Less than 50% of organisations have got round to using customer segmentation to tailor their contact strategies and less than one in five centres has the capability to measure the lifetime value of their customers.

Some 43% of respondents highlighted a lack of executive support as a major challenge that stood in the way of a successful CRM project. While CRM initiatives are being championed by business leaders within companies, it is significant that IT managers manage over 50% of the initiatives. This would indicate that many of the CRM programmes are being internally positioned or viewed as IT enhancements rather than business initiatives.

Despite 95% of respondents indicating that they have a Web site, one in five states that it does not supply the call centre number on its Web site and only 44% have a co-ordinated Web and call centre communications strategy. This finding highlights that the Web is still yet to be fully integrated into the call centre`s overall CRM strategy.

Mike Fairon, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Customer Interactive Solutions (CIS) for Dimension Data, said: "Despite the well documented collective experience of thousands of CRM projects, many companies` initiatives are still failing because they haven`t taken into consideration the business fundamentals. This was reinforced by almost a half of all respondents who stated they lacked any clear goals for CRM. Organisations must realise they can`t expect to just stick in a CRM application and reap the benefits unless they take the time to understand properly their business`s long-term objectives and how it can change the way they deal with customers."

First published in the UK in 1996 by Merchants, European contact centre specialists and a subsidiary of Dimension Data, this year`s edition is the sixth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from over 200 contact centres in 19 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of benchmarks with which to measure their operations against, including contact centre staff salary levels, performance statistics, technology developments, CRM trends and training needs.