Reasons for failure of CRM Programmes:

Too often management views CRM as an easy solution to their business problems.It is often initiatives begin and unfold the management realizes the gaps in the expectations. Some of the causes of failure are:

1. Mistaking CRM as the substitute for good marketing management:

Many marketing managers view a CRM programme as the substitute for marketing management assuming that the programme would lessen the hard work involved in marketing. They place excessive expectation on the CRM software and think the software will by itself look after their customer management tasks. No CRM programme can substitute the hard grind that marketing is all about. CRM  requires superior marketing managers and staff ,who are not only sensitive to the customers, but also willing to put in the needed work in the execution of the CRM programme.

2. Failure to appreciate the dynamic nature of marketing:

Customer’s needs and the value they perceive in various offerings are subject to change overtime. Technology and environment too keep changing, affecting the firm’s customer management strategy. When CRM programme does not take cognizance of this dynamism of marketing, it fails.

3. Preoccupation with gathering of data and neglect of its application:

Application of the insights on customers to marketing action is the core of CRM.. The usefulness of this expenditure depends entirely on the extent to the information is applied to marketing actions.

4. Inadequate appreciation of the potential of the customer database:

The firms lack adequate appreciation of the potential customer base. Their CRM programmes remain as just, PR programmes. They stop with just quarterly customer mailings or monthly customer letters. Measurements of customer satisfaction and protocols for applying the results there of for calculating  the efficacy of marketing are usually non-existent.

5. Failure to use brand intelligibly in the CRM programme:

Using brand intelligibly is the key to successful mass marketing. It is seen whenever the brand and its values are not utilized throughout the CRM process, the results are not favourable. The way customers interact with brands has been changing in recent years. Multiple channels have contributed to this. This means that in the present times, the brand must work in all the channels/media and all the levels/touch points at which the communication take place. CRM must first know how the customers consume its brand and how they relate to it. Using this knowedge,the brand’s value proposition and the various benefits it offers should be tailored to the individual customer and communicated to him in a specific way.

6. Reluctance to measure customer satisfaction precisely:

Many managers are reluctant to precisely measure the level of customer satisfaction. They also fail to set clear parameters/ metrics for this measurement. Obviously, these managers have no way of finding out whether CRM implementation has brought in benefits or not.

7. Failure to follow up the feedback from the customers:

Analysis shows that in many cases, firms painstakingly gather feedback from customers, but afterward forget about it completely. After coercing the customers to fill in any number of feedback forms, suggestion forms and survey questionnaires, they make no attempt to action the feedback or to initiate a further dialogue with them. This is worse than not gathering feedback at all.

8. Reluctance to share the data on customers with all staff:

Many firms have a protectionist approach to information. Their thinking is that information should be made available only on a ‘need to know’ basis within the organization and must be tied closely to rank. This is anti-ethical to CRM. CRM programmes believe in making all relevant information available to all those in the organization, who interact with the customer in one way or the other.

9. Ignoring the need for efficient, trained, well-motivated employees:

Happy customers are the outcome of happy and well motivated employees. And such employees bred only in great workplaces. Companies can succeed in CRM only by having efficient, well-motivated and happy employees. The challenge is often with the speed of response. The firm must resolve customer’s problem adequately and quickly. Employees with the right motivation ‘customer –first’ attitude creates a satisfied customer.

10. Some CRM programmes incur very high costs:

Running a CRM Programme, especially the creation and maintenance of an effective customer database involves significant costs. There are software costs, hardware costs, systems cost, people related costs, training and motivation costs and so on. The business must be capable of generating such revenues and profits that costs of CRM programme do not pose a problem at all. There must also be sproper control of the costs of CRM-both investment costs and operation costs. The CRM programme succeeds only when the net is positive.

11. Failure to appreciate that the scope for CRM varies over businesses:

All businesses and all customers do not lend the same scope or applying CRM. Failure to appreciate this basic fact will lead the CRM programme to failure. For example, in FMCG businesses where the end customers run into millions, and are distance from the company by several tiers of middlemen and geography, a one –to-one relationship is difficult to maintain. They may be better of with traditional mass marketing / communication strategies.

12. Failure to fit in the needed flexibility:

In some cases, CRM programmes fail as they are designed without the needed flexibility. A rigid structure will be incapable of supporting one-to-one marketing. It will not be able to respond to individual customer’s needs in specific ways.

13. Poor planning affects business goals:

Poor planning affects the company’s views of interaction with customers and increases the chances of addressing the wrong issues. Planning must be based on creating new initiatives that will make doing business better for the customer. It includes taking small steps to reach the larger goal.

14. Resistance to Change:

Remaking a company to be genuinely customer-centric is new and uncharted territory and as with anything new, there is always resistance to change. Change often forces people to regress to what they know and protect what they have always been comfortable with.

15. Commitment from senior management:

A solid and total commitment from the most senior management is a must for the CRM project work. The project must have a dedicated senior executive with the strength to sell the program throughout the organization as is champion, assuring the company’s commitment.

CRM Software Selection:

Installing a good CRM software package is the cornerstone of any customer relationship management program. Without good CRM software, gathering and storing the multitude of details gained about a customer from each interaction would be very difficult.

Small business CRM software has gone ahead in leaps bounds in recent years, with several top quality packages now available to choose from. Prior to beginning the search for good CRM software technology however, there are a few basic features you should seek in a potential CRM package:

Basic Functions: The CRM software should manage data relating to both individuals and companies and it should also provide time management features. As most businesses use Microsoft Office, including Outlook, the CRM package should offer seamless integration with MS Office and/or fax software, as the ability to compose letters, faxes and email without leaving the CRM software is vital.

Recognized CRM Software Supplier: Do your research. Make sure your proposed CRM software supplier is recognized in the industry and has a solid backing with reputable customer testimonials and reliable 24/7 technical support.

360 Degree Customer View: It is important to know which people work for the same company; who said, emailed or wrote what to whom, and when. These details need to be a single click away. Does the CRM package you are considering provide this 360-degree view?

Seamless Connectivity: These days it is becoming more and more common for a growing business and its mobile workforce to utilise networked access to a central database, to mobile phones, and to PDAs. You need to ensure your CRM software package supports all the connectivity required by your company.

Managing Campaigns: In order to optimize your business marketing dollars, tracking of marketing campaigns and measuring their performance is critical. You will need a CRM package which provides this function.

Managing Leads: If you want sales opportunities to become closed sales, tracking leads is of prime importance. Make sure you select CRM software which provides lead tracking.

Data Transfer: Unless you are starting a business from scratch, you will probably need to import information from previous software. Make sure you will be able to import directly, instead of spending hours processing the data through an intermediate stage or even worse, manually. You will also need the ability to export data in order to exchange information with businesses who might use another CRM software package.

External Support: To get the most from any CRM package, you will find tips from fellow users, industry-specific templates, plug-ins to be vital. Make sure the package you are considering is well-known and supported.

CRM gurus Dr Martha Rogers and Don Peppers say that practising good CRM means you need to develop a one-to-one learning relationship with each customer, over four stages:

• Identification
• Differentiation
• Interaction
• Interaction

It's about treating different customers differently. It requires a shift in thinking, perseverance, discipline, and very good CRM software.

It will take you many interactions with a customer to improve identification of their details. You will need many customers before you can place them in different segments and cater to their needs by segment. It may take even longer before you know enough to customise individual offerings.

So get researching, for the very best computer CRM software technology suitable to your business. Without it, you are certain to be pushing up hill in your quest to run a successful customer relationship management program.

CRM implementation:

The following are the guidelines to follow before CRM is implemented at the company.

1. Develop corporate wide CRM engagement from key shareholders: 

Many CRM projects fail because critical stakeholders are not involved in setting CRM strategy, assessing requirements and selecting options.

2. Envision the company’s CRM strategy:

CRM is more than just a software. It is also about selecting appropriate methodologies and business practices to help your business enable better relationships with customers. Set some high level customer relationship goals in areas such as increasing customer retention, speeding problem resolution, closing a higher percentage of sales etc.

3. Determine and Prioritize CRM drivers and requirements:

Priorities such include solving problems in the areas such s functional areas that are causing the most pain, cost and missed opportunity for the business, areas where employees are most or least resistant to changing business, weaknesses compared with competitors, complexity of each area that require addressing  and identifying other systems with which it needs to integrate.

4. Develop a CRM roadmap:

Develop a master plan consisting of several smaller steps and projects that will take you towards achieving the corporate CRM vision. For each step spell out key outcomes and metrics, roles and responsibilities, budgets and timeli:nes. Start with low-risk/high reward projects to build momentum and success. Make sure all key stake holders in each project are included up front in solution evaluation and implementation process toe ensure faster, higher user adoption at the end.

5. Think Integration:

Determine how, where and when CRM tools need to integrate with one another and with other applications. This includes evaluating the business processes flow, and identifying process-related customer interactions and transaction that need to be integrated.

6. Do Your Homework and create a short list:

Check out prospective vendors financial and customer references. Talk to peers who have more experience in the CRM area, search websites and pursue publications.

7. Apply the 80-20 rule in the selection process:

Compare how vendors stack up in terms of solution strengths and weaknesses. Have vendors spell out terms and conditions, through document pricing, training, methodology, milestones and metrics for successful deployment.

8. Keep everyone in the loop:

Once you have made a selection, err on the side of over communicating. Get internal evangelists involved early, and encourages inputs along the way as you roll it out. Offer flexible training options to help accommodate different schedules and learning preferences. This will also speed adoption and produce benefits more quickly.

9. Learn, Adjust and Evolve:

Develop a mechanism to monitor use, get feedback and adopt the solution as necessary to make sure its evolving with business and customer needs. Depending on the type of CRM package deployed, you can use surveys, ongoing education, user groups and other venues to stay on top of knowing how these needs are changing, as well as what types of adaptations the solution will be needed over time.

Planning for Transformation:

Because transforming the organization must be a proactive effort,an enterprise-wide planning initiative will be critical. In fact, effective and successful execution of CRM requires that the first step be the development of a very detailed and comprehensive CRM action plan.

The key to building the CRM action plan lies in first understanding where the organization stands relative to each of five aspects of change. The next step is planning process should be a Gap Analysis. This analysis is essentially a comparison of current stage against optimal, relative to the five aspects of business, to identify and specifically describe the gaps. In addition to the more obvious gaps, this analysis should identify exactly where the CRM organizational holes are relative to:

• Marketing, sales and service practices
• Collection, capture, processing and deployment of customer information
• Distribution and operations effectiveness at customer touch points

Another key factor in identifying gaps is to understand how the organization functions relative to the CRM Business Cycle. In the CRM business Cycle, the stages are interdependent and continuous. As one moves from one stage to the other, one gains sufficient insight and understanding that enhances subsequent efforts.

As shown in the diagram, for any organization, business starts with acquisition of customers. However, any successful CRM initiative is highly dependent on a solid understanding of the customers.

Understand and Differentiate:

Organizations cannot have relationship with the customers unless they understand them-what they value, what types of service are important to them, how and when they like to interact, and what and when they want to buy. True understanding is based on a combination of detailed analysis and interaction. To create and foster a relationship, organizations have to act on what they learn about customers. Customers need to see that a company is differentiating service and communication based both on what they have learned independently and what the customers have told them.

Develop and Customize:

In the product oriented world of yesteryears, companies develop products and services and expected customers to buy them. But in today’s customers focused world, product and channel development have to follow the customer’s lead. Organisations are increasingly developing products, services and even new channels, based on customer needs and service expectation.

Interact and Deliver:

Interaction is also a critical component of a successful CRM initiative. It is important to remember that interaction doesn’t just occur through marketing and sales channels and media; customers interact in variety of ways with different divisions of the organization, including distribution and shipping, customer service and online.To foster relationships, organizations need to ensure that

• All areas of the organization have easy access to relevant, actionable customer information
• All areas are trained how to use customer information to tailor interactions, based on both customer needs and potential customer value.

With access to information and appropriate training, organizations will be prepared to steadily enhance the value they deliver to customers. Delivering value is a cornerstone of any relationship. Value is not price of the product or the discount offered. In fact, customer perception of the value are based on a number of factors ,including the quality of products and services, convenience, speed, ease of use, responsiveness and service excellence.

Acquire and Retain:

More the organizations learn about customers, easier it becomes for them to identify areas that fetch great value for the organization. Those are the customers and customer segments a company will want to clone in its prospecting and acquisition efforts. And, because they will continue to learn about what is valuable to each segment, they will be much likely to score a “win” with the right channel, right media, right product, right offer, right timing and most relevant message. Successful customer retention is based simply on the organization’s ability to constantly deliver on three principles:

• Maintain interaction, never stop listening
• Continue to deliver on the customer definition of value.
• Remember that customers change as they move through differing life stages. Be alert for the changes and be prepared to modify the services and value proposition as they change.

Prioritizing the changes:

Since there might be many gaps, an organization has to be prepared to make several changes to make, prioritization is critical. The organization should evaluate each of the strategies identified to plug gaps based on-

• Cost: To implement including initial one-time costs, as well as anticipated on-going expenses.
• Overall benefits: Some changes may have larger impact on the organization’s ability to increase customer value and loyalty.
• Feasibility: Based on organization’s readiness, data and system support resource skill-sets and a number of other factors.
• Time required: including the time necessary for training and addressing ‘cultural’ change management issues related to a specific strategy.

Measuring Success:

Implementing CRM is time consuming and demands a significant commitment across the cross-section of the organization. It is crucial that the action plan-

• Establish means of measuring your progress on CRM initiatives
• Establish enterprise wide measures of success and metrics that can be applied to all of your CRM initiatives.
• Apply these metrics on an ongoing basis to ensure continued funding of your CRM initiatives.

A common challenge in many organizations is that various groups, departments and divisions have varying means of measuring and reporting on the success of their CRM and customer related initiatives. Some may look at response rates and others may look at capture rates. Some may look at increasing in average order, others may look at number of contacts required to close a sale. Needless to say, the result is a lack of consistent results on CRM initiatives, and confusion between departments ad in senior management about the measures of success of these initiatives.

Ideally, each of the potential initiatives should be tied to projected improvements in customer dynamics-acquisition, retention, penetration and/or reactivation. The next step is to determine how improvements in these dynamics impact revenues, costs and/or competitive differentiation. Finally, it is important to establish universal metrics around these customer dynamics. Each of these four dynamics can be measured by the following: percentages, number of customers, number of products per customer etc. Since customer relationships represent ongoing investments, it is important to also project the future behavior and projected value of your customers while measuring the success of your CRM initiatives. This is the concept of Lifetime Value (LTV).

A customer scorecard can be developed to reflect customer dynamics in a way that is most meaningful to your organization, This scorecard should reflect measures of acquisition, retention, penetration and reactivation across al business lines,divisions and functional areas. The customer score card concept reinforces the concept of cumulative enterprise-wide impacts on customer relationships. A scorecard should be fairly simple in order to facilitate easy understanding.

CRM Business Transformation Process:

In most companies, the business focus, organization structures and related business metrics are the biggest inhibitors of CRM initiatives. All areas of the organization will have to change, in order to truly support and foster CRM initiatives.

The CRM Business Transformation Map below shows the various aspects of that change.

There are five inter-related areas. These include:

• Business Focus
• Organisation structure
• Business Metrics
• Marketing Focus
• Technology

Business Focus: Product	Sales	Channel	Marketing	Service	Customer
Organization structure: Product Management	Place Management	Promotion Management	Channel Management	Contact management	Customer Management
Business Metrics: Product performance	Place performance	Program Performance	Customer Revenues	Customer Patterns & Profitability	Customer Lifetime value & Loyalty
Marketing Focus: Mass Advertising	Sales Promotion	Marketing Campaigns	Integrated Marketing  Communication	Segmentation Specific Marketing	Customer Relationship Management
Technology: Transaction Processing	Data Maintenance	Data Access	Data Warehouse	Data Marts	Customer Touch point Systems

Five Core Areas of Business Transformation

The Chart depicts typical stages of transformation within established organizations. The stages of transformation proceed from left to right i.e from product to customer. it is important to note that movement from one stage to another does not equate to abandoning the previous stage. Rather, it is a matter of an organization shifting its emphasis over time.

Transforming the Business Focus of an organization essentially means getting the organization to buy in the customer-focused paradigm. The business focus may shift from “How can we increase the sales of our products” to “what our customer needs?” There may be stages of sales, channel, marketing and service focus during the transformation process. The Business Focus transformation is obviously critical to the success of any CRM initiative.

Changing the organizational structure of a company goes hand in hand with the changes in business focus. Most organizations today retain a product focus with product managers driving business decisions. The transformation to a customer focused organization should lead to literally organizing around your customers., assigning customer segment manager’s responsibility for acquisition, retention and growth of different segments of customers. This is a major hurdle for most organizations, as it often means augmenting their existing product or channel structure with customer management staff and additional headcount.

Transforming the Business Metrics should be a by-product of the changes noted above .In this case, the shift is from a single focus on product performance. and /or promotion performance, or decentralized views of these metrics, to a focus on customer lifetime value and loyalty. Rather than simply measuring response rates and product profitability, they’re asking the critical questions “Do we have profitable relationship with our customers? How can we make these relationships more profitable?” Once again there is a gradual shift, they don’t abandon the product, place, program and revenue measures immediately, but they do begin to shift some of the focus to the ultimate question of customer relationships.

Changing the Market Focus of the organization from mass to interactive dialogue is essential. This transformation seems to receive the most attention, in many marketing circles today. It is important to note that while companies are increasingly investing in one-to one dialogue, mass marketing communication still plays an important role in generating broad-scale awareness and interest.

Finally, there is a Technology Transformation. As with marketing focus, this area has received a great deal of attention in data base marketing areas. It seems that everyone has a CRM to sell. CRM technology must support and enable meaningful customer dialogued at all points of contact. Technology is actually the easiest of the areas to change. Companies can “buy their way” over to the right hand side of the transformation map. Because of this, technology often gets ahead of the other areas of transformation. Technology plays a critical support role, but should not be the driver of CRM initiatives.

CRM and Call Center

Call Center Process:

The Call center is the real operation theatre in telemarketing. In a CRM call center, customers communicate in many ways that include phone, e-mail, web chat, personal sales representative, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and a host of others. Several telecallers are hired for tele call operations.

CRM call centers help companies realign their entire organization around customers. And thus, it is a strategic business initiative sales, marketing and services as well as other groups are connected and coordinated through the CRM applications. Before a call is made to the customer, all recent activity with that customer should be reviewed. Then a sales strategy needs to be planned , based upon observed opportunities. The use of CRM software in the Call centre allows the assignment of a value to each customer if the culture supports that philosophy.

How the Call Center works?

It usually has a manager in overall charge, a few supervisors and the required number of tele-callers. Normally, the tele-callers are grouped in teams of six or seven callers, each supervisor handling one such team. The tele-callers sit in front of a computer terminal and speak into their headsets as telephone operators do in any telephone exchange. Simultaneously they access information on the terminal, and add fresh data on it as the tele-calling progresses.

The tele caller opens the call by greeting the prospect appropriately. Then she politely seeks the customer’s permission to have a brief conversation. She strikes the right chord with the prospect and explains the offering. She generates adequate interest in the product and tries to clinch an order. If this step does not materialize, follow up calls are made to secure the order.

The tele-callers are usually provided with a script with which they practice a game. Once they become comfortable, they resort to improvisation as required and try to make tele-marketing more effective. The scripts for the calls are worked out jointly by the telemarketer and professional consultants hired by the telemarketer. They are also pre tested with a few prospects. The supervisor is always available close at hand , she keeps track of productivity and the call quality of her team.

Advantages of CRM Call Center:

CRM helps the company identify most valuable customers and understanding their life time values. Using CRM, the call centers design the organization systems and service to best meet the needs of customers and maximize their value. CRM is intended for long term relationship building. Besides capturing the different forms of customer interaction, CRM allows to capture and store all available customers in the central history database. This allows agents the ability to pull up a customer’s entire history while the two interact. Communication and service are more effective and efficient. Most CRM products also track trends in purchasing and customer feedback.

DATA WAREHOUSING

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization’s electronically stored data. Data Warehouse are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis. This classic definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. However, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data, and to manage dictionary data are also considered essential components of a data warehousing system. An expanded definition of data warehousing includes business intelligence tools, tools to extract, transform, and load data into repository, and tools to manage and retrieve metadata.

Benefits of Data warehousing:

Some of the benefits that a data warehouse provides are as follows:

• A data warehouse provides a common data model for data, regardless of the data’s source. This makes it easier to report, analyze information than it would be if multiple data models from disparate sources were used to retrieve information such as sales invoices, order receipts, general ledger charges etc.

• Prior to loading of data into data warehouse inconsistencies are identified and resolved. This greatly simplifies reporting and analysis.

• Information in the data warehouse is under the control of data warehouse users so that, even if the source system data is purged over time, the information in the warehouse can be stored safely for extended periods of time.

• Because they are separate from operational systems, data warehouses provide fast retrieval of data without slowing down operational systems.

• Data warehouses facilitate decision support system applications such as trend reports (e.g. Items with the most sales in a particular area within the last two years), exception reports, and reports that show actual performance versus goals.

• Data warehouses can work in conjunction with and hence enhance the value of operational business applications, notably customer relationship management systems.

Full-Fledged e-CRM:

While practically all the firms use Internet in CRM to some extent, and some also promote appropriate virtual customer communities, some of them go further step and carry out their CRM entirely electronically, as their business lend for such an approach. Electronic CRM (e-CRM) simply means ‘total online management of customer relationship’. e-CRM does electronically all the things a normal CRM does offline.

Let us take Up-selling and Cross selling as an example .Suppose a customer buys a couple of books on a particular subject from a certain web book shop. The e-CRM system of the shop/site will take care of up selling and cross selling requirement. The next time a new book on the subject or any related subject is out, the customer will automatically and immediately get an intimation of it.

E-CRM enables web base customer interaction, automation of e-mail, call logs, website analytics, partner relationship management and campaign management.

Survey Management Software:Survey Management software automates an enterprise to create electronic surveys, polls, questionnaires and enables understand customer preferences and customer service.

Contact Management Software: This enables an enterprise to create, track and manage partnerships, contracts and agreements etc. It also enables to provide call centre service and help desk service. 

Lead Management Enterprise: Lead management Software enables an organization to manage, track and forecast sales leads. It also helps to understand and improve conversion rates.

Factors behind the big growth in e-CRM:

Mainly, it is the proliferation of e-businesses /click and mortar businesses that has led to the big growth of e-CRM. Besides their proliferation, their coming under competitive environment too has been a reason. In these businesses, e-CRM fills this void. To an extent, the non e-businesses too have contributed to e-CRM’s growth, as a good part of their customers could be approached through the Internet.Expansion in iInternet penetration and proliferation of portals has been supporting the growth.

Using the Internet in CRM:

The Internet is already being used to great advantage in CRM. It is indeed an ideal medium for effective customer contact and customer care/service in several businesses. Many companies in these businesses thrive by opting for the Net in handling customer relations and providing service to the customers.

Forming “Virtual Customer Communities”:

Today, customers everywhere are forming self-servicing, tight –knit virtual communities. Internet chat rooms a part of this process. The chat rooms are easy to start, join and participate. And they accommodate people with different personalities. These virtual communities exercise a powerful influence on the market in respect of several products. The power becomes all the more significant in view of the speed with which they can be mobilized. Words spread fast on the Internet. Marketers can form their own virtual communities as a part of their CRM  programmes.

 

Impact of the Internet:

Communicating well online is becoming more important than communicating well over the telephone. That may sounds like a contrived exaggeration but consider the transitory nature of the phone call and the permanence of an e-mail.

Whether a company grants a refund to a customer based on a misunderstanding over the phone has to do with company policy and the relative status of the particular customer, than with the actual content of the call.

On the other hand, email stands as testimony to the words that were exchanged. An email can be saved by both sides, without worrying about the legality of recording a telephone call. “Some calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes” is very different from “All Calls can and will be recorded, tabulated, indexed and stored in case of disputes”. Email however can much more become part of customer’s ‘permanent record’ along with invoices and packing lists.

Integration of CRM with ERP:

An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system allows to integrate engineering, customer service, planning materials, manufacturing, finance and human resources across a single facility or across multiple locations.

Need to integrate CRM with ERP solutions:

There are number of reasons why business should integrate CRM and ERP solutions. Companies with high volumes of sales transactions see almost immediate benefits in order-to-cash process. Specifically, the cost savings come from reducing errors in order entry, implementing approval workflows for discounts, and reducing the manual labour required to enter orders in both CRM and ERP. Even organizations with relatively low order volumes can experience significant cost reductions through improved order accuracy.

There are several marketing benefits associated with integrating CRM and ERP, such as greater insights into customer base. ERP systems store customer’s financial relationship with the company. CRM solutions store their buying patterns and marketing demographics. Unifying these two stores of customer data can help organizations ensure that their sales, marketing and service expenditure are targeting their most valuable customers and prospects.

To make integration successful, it is important to work with business-solution expert who will provide the company with the insight needed to select an integration architecture and development plan, based upon functional needs and technical suitability.