CRM Consideration
When implemented professionally, CRM allows you to improve your customer’s experience. This is done by integrating your sales channels for greater efficiency and developing a deep understanding of your customer’s buying behaviour allowing you to tailor your offers and selling strategies.
For some businesses, especially at the mid-market level, hiring application service providers (ASP’s) to host and maintain some CRM operations can be a simple and cost-effective solution. This article gives you pointers on what to look out for before you integrate a CRM solution.
The first step is to understand the problem you're trying to solve. Many businesses fail to pinpoint simple customer service problems. Companies that are successful in understanding customer service problems have reaped rewards.
Another common cause of poor CRM implementation is the classic mistake of falling in love with the technology itself rather than looking critically at how it can help execute go-to-market strategies and processes. One service provider purchased a particular CRM package solely because it was the one used by its leading competitor.
Different companies have different sales strategies and processes, and therefore different technology needs. Therefore, it is advisable to use a phased approach. First, understand your customer’s needs, sales channel preferences (e.g., direct sales, tele-sales) and profitability to you. Second, define your coverage strategies; how you plan to increase target customer acquisition, retention and penetration. Third, use this information to carefully evaluate and select technology and vendors.

Clarify the role of CRM
Decide how CRM technology should support your marketing strategy. One way to do this is by increasing efficiencies through the automation of time-consuming steps and elimination of redundant steps. Another way is by sharing customer information across all channels. This enables all the sales, customer service and marketing resources interacting with an account to have the same information, such as product purchases, order status and other facts.

Prepare for action
A key step in identifying the right technology enablers is to evaluate existing technology capabilities and map out the desired functionality. The next step is to identify the technology requirements needed to close the gaps between what already exists and what is desired. Once the potential requirements have been identified, they can be prioritized based on their impact. The final step is to develop a business case that clarifies the estimated return from investing in new CRM technologies to drive specific marketing objectives.

Show how CRM will support the company's vision
CRM is viewed as a central part of a company's growth and overall strategy. The transition from brick-and-mortar to the Internet is supported by a CRM system. It has to help the business incorporate Web and e-mail information into everything that they do. The final step, post implementation is to see if the CRM systems are meeting customer needs

CRM market trends
Customer care, has traditionally been looked upon as a secondary function in most organizations. However, corporations everywhere have sat up and started taking notice of the fact that there is a tremendous amount of untapped value in their customer base. Deploying a CRM system without thinking through all the implications is an open invitation for confusion. In the short term, it may do a lot more harm than good. A good way to get started on your CRM initiative is to study the CRM trends. These trends discuss the implications and future prospects of CRM. They can be split into two broad categories; market and implementation trends.

CRM market trends
Increased customer expectations
With the increase in availability of information, global competition and deregulation in many industries, customer expectations are being set by direct competitors and by enterprises in other industries. Increasing customer expectations are driving the adoption of new channels, leading to poorly implemented multi-channel strategies. That situation is lowering customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and making CRM even more vital.

Greater complexity in the customer relationship
The relationship complexity function between an enterprise and its customers states that: Relationship Complexity = (No. of Segments) x (No. of Products) x (No. of Channels) x (No. of Corporations). All variables in the equation are increasing due to new technology, greater mobility and faster development of new products.

A shift from mass production to mass customisation
Customers want an exact fit to their requirements. Mass customization provides an answer to that demand for products and services. The Internet enables improved supplier collaboration to support mass customization. However, the evolution to collaborative commerce is still in a nascent stage.

CRM implementation trends
A shift in CRM application architecture and spending
Packages are replacing in-house developed applications. Client/server architectures are moving to Web-based architectures and point solutions are being replaced by CRM suites that handle most functions. Enterprises are moving toward greater use of application service providers for software. Call-center outsourcing is increasing due to a lack of skills and staff, but database marketing is being done in-house.

Increased customer data
The bulk of spending for CRM applications has been on sales and customer service. Beyond those areas, however, marketing and analytics are now the fastest-growing areas. This is due to an explosion of customer data from transactional, personalization, click stream, communications, and the resulting analysis. A Gartner forcast expects customer data management to become a key skill set.

Privacy and data protection
Gartner believes the CRM trends listed above, although important, will not be the most critical in 2001. The biggest CRM issue of the upcoming year is likely to be customer privacy concerns.
Consumer willingness to divulge details about themselves is the lifeblood of CRM. The key question is whether the trend will be toward greater privacy and data protection or toward greater sharing of personal information by consumers. In either case, enterprises that do not act responsibly with customer data will be in a constant situation of getting and then losing customers and will ultimately be wasting their CRM investments.
Managers cannot ignore any of the CRM trends and should focus on customer data management and analysis, CRM vendor viability and the main causes of CRM project failure. The next article discusses the key issues to be aware of to ensure your CRM solution is successful.