The ROI of CRM
STRATEGIES FOR MEASURING AND MAXIMIZING
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

THE METRICS & MEASUREMENTS HAVE COME OF AGE
CRM STRATEGIES: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN’T
FRONT OFFICE AND BACK: THE OPERATIONAL SIDE OF CRM
GETTING SMARTER ALL THE TIME: CRM ANALYTICS AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
 

CRM STRATEGIES:
THE METRICS & MEASUREMENTS HAVE COME OF AGE

BY TOM F I E L D

IT USED TO BE THAT A GOOD CRM strategy was a lot like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 opinion on obscenity: hard to define, but you knew one if you saw it. Trouble is, just a few short years ago it was tough to even see a truly good CRM strategy.
CRM projects? Yes, tons of them. Everybody in the late ’90s had a CRM initiative. But metrics, results, ROI? Not so much.
Funny what an economic downturn will do, though. As IT budgets shrank and projects disappeared in the
quagmire of the 2001 recession,  the CRM imperative— the mandate to get closer and more responsive to customers —only grew, and with it emerged a whole new set of metrics, results and, yes, good CRM strategies.
That’s what this edition of  Strategic Directions is all about: The ROI of CRM—Strategies for Measuring and Maximizing Customer Relationships. What works and what doesn’t? What’s IT’s role in a CRM strategy, and who actually “owns” the initiative? How do you pick a CRM vendor? Where do CRM analytics and business intelligence meet?
These are some of the questions tackled this issue, with answers and testimonials coming from the industry’s leading CRM vendors and their customers. Real strategies, real results, real advice.
It strikes me that now is a critical time for CRM initiatives. The new year is starting, the economy is turning around and enterprises are loosening their purse strings for new projects. It’s an ideal time to start defining or refining a CRM strategy.
Maybe you’re just warming up for a CRM project; maybe you’ve been burned before. Either way, this Strategic Directions has valuable information to help ensure that not only will you know a good CRM strategy when you see it —but you’ll also be able to measure and maximize it.

CRM STRATEGIES: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN’T
The Top Line is All About Customers, But the Bottom Line is About IT’s Role in Obtaining and Retaining Them

JUST ASK THE FOLKS ON Wall Street: boosting the bottom line with cost savings and productivity improvements isn’t enough these days—a necessary but not sufficient condition for competitive success. Now it’s time to add topline revenues. And the top line is all about customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) strategies and the technologies that enable them make it possible to figure out what customers want and the most profitable ways to give it to them— important in an age when acquiring new customers is about five to 10 times the
cost of retaining current ones.
CRM strategies are based on the premise that quick, accurate knowledge about customers empowers organizations to increase the value of current  customers, keep them longer and more effectively acquire new customers.
Despite widely circulated reports of CRM implementation failures, enterprises continue to invest in CRM technologies and solutions. Why? Because CRM-enabling technologies really can help enterprises to:

•Develop a single view of customer data. This way, regardless of touchpoint, every customer gets consistent information; duplication and redundancy is trimmed; customers aren’t required to repeatedly feed in the same information about themselves to get  service, which keeps them happier and improves sales and customer service staff productivity.

• Provide realtime (or near-realtime) information. So sales and customer service reps as well as customers can check product availability, order status, etc.; products and services can be more accurately  and easily configured by sales staff.

• Identify and target key customer groups. Detailed knowledge about each customer can drive efforts to target their needs and spending capabilities; high-value customers can be identified and given priority.

• Track and measure sales, customer service, and marketing performance. Leads can be linked to the marketing campaigns that spawned them, so their effectiveness can be tracked; leads can be funneled more effectively to the most appropriate channel sales force; products
and services for targeted customer groups can be developed in response to customer interest and demand.

• Best practices can be identified and consistently implemented. The most effective sales, service and marketing practices can be uniformly applied; sales logs can be automatically updated; repetitive, time-gobbling tasks—such as fulfilling requests for product literature
—can be automated.

Evidence abounds that CRM implementations can succeed—and when they do, returns on CRM investment can be spectacular. Gartner, Inc., the Connecticut-based research/analysis firm, believes those organizations that devote at least 50 percent of their efforts to advanced customer-centric marketing processes will see a marketing ROI by 2007 that’s 30 percent greater than those who don’t.
 

Consider the UK’s Woolwich Independent Financial Advisory Services (WIFAS): its combined use of Oracle’s Database, Warehouse Builder, Portal, Application Server and other products has generated $23 million in cost savings and productivity gains, resulting in a 260 percent ROI. Its commitment to CRM has helped WIFAS grow by more than 250 percent in four years, as compared to a market average of 75 percent.

Yet, according to Gartner, as many as 85 percent of enterprises don’t understand how CRM creates value in their customer bases, at least in part because their CRM implementations have been piecemeal and disjointed. What’s missing is an enterprisewide CRM strategy that addresses these critical challenges:
.Supporting (and cost-justifying) an ever-widening range of marketing, sales and support activities while still presenting “one friendly face” to customers.
.Satisfying increasingly demanding customers—some of whom are much more valuable than others.
.Integrating information from a multiplicity of barely-coordinated data silos.

CREATING A CRM BUSINESS STRATEGY
How does your enterprise use its competencies to create value propositions for its customers? Which market sectors offer the most promise?
A CRM strategy—which lays out how that promise will be pursued— can’t be formed without answers to these questions. And the strategy
must be devised before plans for implementing the capabilities needed to achieve it can be completed. Steps along the way include:

KNOW YOUR OBJECTIVES. The idea is to keep and acquire customers with the greatest value potential. By establishing objectives, one can determine specific, quantifiable customer acquisition, development and retention targets that meet corporate financial goals.
How this is best accomplished depends on the kind of organization and its priorities. Of course, customer retention is important to just about all organizations. Business-to-business enterprises aiming to become a preferred supplier often give high priority to customer
development. Business-to-consumer enterprises with an eye to boosting market share concentrate on customer acquisition. Government and nonprofit organizations tend to care most about customer satisfaction.

KNOW THYSELF. Start by answering these questions:

• What are your enterprise’s goals and imperatives?
   
• What should be achieved with a CRM initiative?
   
• What business units will be affected?
   
• What’s the condition of the IT infrastructure?
   
• What needs to be upgraded,integrated?

TRANSFORM YOUR CUSTOMER BASE INTO AN ASSET. Be customer-centric. Focus objectives on your customer lifecycle, which then mirror your product/service lifecycle. This means:

• Analyze your customers. Look for ways that customer value is lost or unexploited. When you’ve spotted where action is required, you can set metrics and monitor them.
• Jibe CRM and corporate strategies. CRM strategy cannot stand alone; it must be derived from corporate goals and imperatives, and it must be linked to other operational strategies.
   
• Keep it flexible. In a challenging, competitive environment unpredictably impacted by discontinuous change, CRM strategy needs to be dynamic and timely, adapting operational efforts and corporate direction to market conditions. Thus, successful CRM strategy evolves in an iterative process that takes advantage of customer and operational feedback to refine objectives, tactics and processes.

BUILD A REPEATABLE, CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVING PROCESS. The goal is to efficiently utilize all your organization’s resources to present one friendly, consistent face to customers. Customers should get the same information about  your company from any channel—from website to call center to sales force to marketing brochure.
“With the creation of a warm handoff process, opportunity can be passed directly to the correct department,” says Michael Koval, vice president and CIO at Long & Foster Cos., a real estate services provider with more than 10,000 sales associates. “Based on customer
demands and expectation, service lines can either be created or modified. Basically, you align the customer demands to your product offerings.”

ACHIEVING THIS REQUIRES:

• Maintaining the quality of customer interactions by tracking and analyzing all interactions with the aim of refining and improving them in the future;
• Acquiring appropriate knowledge about customers with each interaction;
• Integrating customer data so that it’s as complete and accurate as possible and making it accessible and useable.

Using Oracle’s E-Business Suite to update its ERP system and add CRM capabilities, C-COR dropped days sales outstanding by 8 percent, which translated into a one-time $3.7 million reduction in the company’s accounts receivable balance. The firm also slashed
engineering change order process time by 85 percent and cut monthly closing time by 50 percent.
 

IT’sROLE: THE IMPLEMENTERS
“CRM implementations fail because they’re seen as only an IT implementations,” says Steve Wright, vice president of CRM deployment at IBM.
“Without changing the supporting processes and the surrounding employee behavior and culture, driven from the highest executive level,
you will not succeed.”
IT might not own CRM, but it’s usually responsible for the care and feeding of CRM technologies and solutions.
Failed CRM projects tend to lack customer-centric strategy, shun organizational change, fail to benchmark and don’t keep end-users happy.
 

Successful CRM efforts share these qualities:
• Customer-centric strategies. Customers are looking for added value, so figure out how to give it to them.
Using PeopleSoft CRM, financial services consultant Carreker Corp.’s ability to identify unmet customer needs and then cross-sell and up-sell its products and services will result in an estimated 10 percent revenue growth with no additional employees.
• Careful planning and benchmarking. You’ll need realistic, measurable metrics—e.g., productivity increases, faster sales cycles—that signal revenue growth and/or cost reductions. And you’ll need to benchmark so you can make before and after comparisons.
• A champion. Sponsorship from the top is critical.
• Early involvement of end-users and designs that keep them happy. During the planning phase, do more than just gather project requirements—use the effort as an opportunity to gather project support, too.
Anticipate fear of change, especially  from sales staffs who want to preserve their independence, by showing end users what they’ll gain—e.g., realtime access to customer data, easy access to accurate product inventories. Make sure the CRM user interface is friendly and smoothly navigable.
• Incremental rollout. One approach is to define a small number of small projects—each needing just a few months to implement—that you believe will deliver the best results.
• Willingness to make organizational changes. You may need to redraw functional boundaries and redesign workflows. For many organizations, CRM efforts are most successful when they involve process change. Carreker Corp. overhauled its customer support call center with automated workflow and improved processes to save $200,000 per year while boosting customer satisfaction.
“Traditional internal processes tend to be silo-oriented, driving efficiency only within their function,” says Peter Andino, vice president of global sales and technical support at IBM. “CRM doesn’t work in silos. Rather, it requires an end-to-end ‘horizontal’ view of the process linkages. When the hard work of process re-engineering is not done, your CRM system is going to be less successful.”
• Training for those whose jobs will change. They’ll need more than just tech training; you’ll need to explain and justify the changes you’re imposing on their working lives.
• Integration of data, apps and processes. As CXOs seek better ways to measure and assess financial and operation performance across the enterprise, CIOs must integrate—not just data, but also applications and sometimes even business processes. This can result in initiatives that link CRM with other key corporate systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise marketing management (EMM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM) and service lifecycle management (SLM).
 

Canada Post Corp., Canada ’s fifth largest employer, is using mySAP CRM to integrate 80 legacy systems, increase cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, reduce data entry and maintenance costs, deliver superior customer service while streamlining processes and increase sales force efficiency. The company expects to eliminate 26 percent in revenue leakage and projects an ROI of 26 percent.

“CRM, by its nature, calls for a companywide focus,” says Andino. “Every function within a company needs to understand its role in creating
customer satisfaction.”

WHO OWNS CRM?
Experienced IT groups have learned that CRM needs a business owner able to drive how the enterprise should develop and use it. CRM projects driven by IT alone are much more likely to fail.
CIOs need partners in the enterprise to make CRM successful. Best bet: cross-functional teams led by an influential skeptic and comprised of key stakeholders and those with appropriate skills. You’ll need commitment from:

THE CFO. Without a convincing business case, the CFO won’t fund your project.

CUSTOMER SERVICE. These folks know more about your organization’s customers than anyone else. Listen to them as you design and build a CRM initiative.

MARKETING. Often tactical and product-oriented, insights about customers from marketing people can improve customer handling and campaigns.
 

Interdepartmental collaboration in areas where customer impact can be measured can help CRM managers launch cooperative projects that deliver tangible benefits.

Formalizing access to customer data, and rationalizing that data across all enterprise functions and departments, enables a cross-functional integration that can pay off big time. For instance, when database marketers collaborate with business unit managers, both will better appreciate the others’ needs and abilities.

“IT is the only department that intersects with all parts of a company from a strategic perspective,” says Michael Koval, vice president and CIO at real estate services provider Long & Foster. “With the correct players, IT can successfully implement the software. We can attest to that.”

CRM FOR THE ZERO-LATENCY, REALTIME ENTERPRISE
The ability to respond to events and conditions in realtime or near-realtime can provide substantial competitive advantage.
Faster response means business decisions are based on up-to-the-minute (realtime) information. Pulling it off requires integration of not just data and applications, but also key CRM, ERP and SCM processes so that decision makers have an accurate view of the organization’s
activities and capabilities. This means:
• Comparing actual process performance to key performance indicators that are based on organizational objectives and
• Balancing resource utilization against cost and revenue goals.
 

Such performance management (also called business activity monitoring) enables decision makers to consistently and continuously deploy resources and align processes to achieve strategic goals.

Singapore’s OCBC Bank has achieved more than $2.3 million in savings each year since implementing Siebel Finance in September 2000. The bank’s successful CRM strategy has reduced insurance application processing time by 99 percent (from three days to one minute);
cut information retrieval time by 83 percent (from 12 minutes to two minutes per customer); shortened customer referral time by 96 percent (from 45 minutes to two minutes); accelerated feedback escalation time by 80 percent (from five minutes to one minute); and reduced
telesales time by 80 percent (from 15 minutes to three minutes per referral).

SELECTING CRM VENDORS: SUITE VS. BEST-OF-BREED
“Businesses understand much better now what information technology can do for improving how they work with their customers and partners,” says John Wookey, senior vice president, applications development, at Oracle Corp. “As the economy rebounds, more and
more companies will return CRM to the top of their shopping lists as they focus on harnessing customer information, wherever it may lie within an enterprise, to put the customer at the center of their businesses and maximize the value of their networks of relationships.”

Whether you should opt for a CRM suite from a single vendor or an assortment of best of breed applications depends on the complexity of your implementation as well as whether you’ll be relying on systems integrators and/or external service providers.

Gevity HR has implemented several Oracle E-Business Suite components with impressive results: 27-percent reduction in transaction worktime, a doubling of payroll staff productivity in 18 months and a 6-percent rise in client retention.

“There are 40 to 50 different types of solutions that fit under the CRM umbrella,” says Laurie McCabe, vice president at consultancy Summit Strategies. “Some vendors cover a lot of this territory in a suite with different modules; others offer very specific point solutions.
There are trade-offs in either approach, but make sure to fully understand them relative to your business’ own unique requirements.”
Advises Michael Dunne, vice president and research director at Gartner, Inc.:
• Do your homework and follow a formal evaluation process.
• Remember: you are not just buying a product, but also relationships.
• Pay attention to the total cost: software typically represents only a portion of your total
cost; services represent the greatest risk and most expensive part of the endeavor.
• In this uncertain business environment, don’t ignore vendor viability.

FRONT OFFICE AND BACK: THE OPERATIONAL SIDE OF CRM
 

FRONT-OFFICE CRM solutions focus on three key customer facing or customer-oriented functions: sales, customer service and marketing. The payoffs from each can be impressive.

[1]SALES PAYOFFS

When sales people can spend more sales time with customers, the top line benefits:

SALES FORCE AUTOMATION. After implementing Siebel eSales and Siebel Finance, Robeco Bank Belgium saw the number of customers each of its account managers could handle jump by 20.

PERCENT. Prior to its 2001 launch of mySAP CRM, third-party agents for IPSOA, a leader in the Italian publishing market, spent approximately 35 percent of their available selling time in problem solving mode. Today, IPSOA sales agencies conduct an average of 1.5 more customer visits per week, and agents’ selling time has increased from 65 percent to 75 percent of overall time.

SALES CONFIGURATION. Thanks to Siebel’s eConfigurator, Asyst Technologies, maker of semiconductor automation systems, has become 50 percent more accurate in its materials inventory forecasting, and in one sales group the average order configuration time has
dropped from 25 days to two days.

ORDER MANAGEMENT. As part of an integrated provisioning process based on Siebel and TIBCO solutions, Oklahomabased
WitTel Communications has reduced order entry errors by 25 percent, enabling it to reassign 12 employees. The  company estimates that it’s saved 450,000 person-hours, and reductions in paper processing alone save $10,000 per month. Customer-requested due dates are now achieved 90 percent of the time, up from 40 percent, which has helped to raise customer satisfaction levels from 56 percent to 89 percent.

SALES PORTALS. After implementing a portal using Siebel CRM, AMP Financial Services cut the time needed to route leads from nearly two weeks to just 30 minutes.

E-TAILING. Digital Wellbeing, a major ebusiness for UK pharmacy giant Boots, is using mySAP CRM to enhance the etailing experience for its health and beauty products customers. The company expects to derive a 72-percent internal rate of return from its mySAP CRM initiative.

[2]CUSTOMER SERVICE PAYOFFS

mySAP CRM is helping Brother International reduce product returns and anticipate customer needs. The leading manufacturer of fax, printers and multifunction products projects a 129-percent percent ROI—and calculates that the reduction in product returns will save it
more than $1.6 million annually.

CALL CENTERS. Using Nortel Networks’ Symposium Call Center has enabled New Zealand’s APN News & Media to cut call handling from five minutes to 3.5 minutes and to reduce time-on-hold to one minute from three-to-four minutes. British outsourcer Vertex has reduced
call center operational costs by 10-to-30 percent with Symposium, and the productivity of its home-based employees has climbed 13-to-16 percent.
Since 1999, when it deployed Siebel’s Automotive Call Center, Mitsubishi Motors North America has boosted call center volume by 75 percent, lowered per-call costs by 38 percent and reduced its call-abandon rate by 8 percent.
After using Siebel Call Center to streamline dozens of business processes, Asyst Technologies reports 22,000 hours in productivity savings—and cost reductions of $1.7 million—in its call center.
The UK city of Hull has used Oracle CRM technology to implement a multichannel customer service center that has cut lost calls from 14 percent to one percent, raised the number of calls answered from 57 percent to over 98 percent, and saved the city $190,000.

SELF-SERVICE. With PeopleSoft CRM, Carreker Corp. anticipates savings of $1.2 million per year by deploying customer self-service. The firm has reduced helpdesk call volume by 90 percent; customer support headcount is down by 25 percent. Ten databases have been
combined into one, and three customer support systems have been consolidated for a savings of $450,000 per year. Carreker estimates that by moving just 10 percent of its customers to self-service, it can add up to 20 new customers without adding staff.
Taking aim at its heavy email volume, retailer Eddie Bauer used Kana IQ to add self-service capabilities and a smart email management solution. In the first month of deployment, 80 percent of customer inquiries were handled by ‘Ask Eddie,’ Eddie Bauer’s self-service application. Today all email inquiries are answered in under two hours. The first company of any kind in Israel to adopt a comprehensive, automated, intelligent self-service solution into its call centers, Bank Leumi’s successful deployment of Kana IQ has resulted in training cost savings of 66 percent as well as a 17 percent boost in call avoidance.

FIELD SERVICE AUTOMATION (FSA). Storage networking solutions provider CNT’s field engineers have realized an estimated 1,800 hours of productivity savings after deploying Siebel Field Service automation.

[3]MARKETING PAYOFFS

Aegis Communications Group uses PeopleSoft CRM to reduce the time it takes to develop telemarketing scripts from a week to a couple of days. Result: marketing programs are developed and executed 50 percent faster.
Hewlett-Packard Corp. is using Kana Marketing to dynamically select the most appropriate channel partner to follow up each lead, and to manage and follow up leads in real time, thus increasing the effectiveness of indirect sales channels and priority-direct sales. Result: direct
sales revenue has increased by 250 percent in the first six months and channel switching is down by 50 percent.

[4]BRINGING IT TOGETHER

“CRM-enabling technologies should help an enterprise enhance performance in all areas—sales, marketing and customer
service—that make doing business convenient and effortless,” says Roxann Swanson, general manager, customer
contact and self-service solutions at Nortel Networks.
“To maximize effectiveness,” she adds, “these technologies must also embrace the cornerstone of customer interactions—contact centers and selfservice applications—which need to be integrated seamlessly with face-to-face interactions and unified with CRM and other business applications to create measurable and manageable business operations. Then an enterprise is able to take the customer’s point of view, to keep learning about individual customers and to use this knowledge to creatively differentiate an individual offer to strengthen
customer loyalty.”
 

GETTING SMARTER ALL THE TIME: CRM ANALYTICS & BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
 

ACCORDING TO AN IDC study, organizations that have successfully implemented analytic applications have seen returns stretching from
17 percent to more than 2000 percent; the study found a median return on investment (ROI) of 112 percent.

That’s because business intelligence tools and analytics solutions help them achieve insight into customer behavior and values and use
this information to holistically manage marketing performance. The paybacks can be significant:

In 2002, GlaxoSmithKline AG upgraded its database and business intelligence toolset, opting for Oracle’s Warehouse Builder, Sales Analyzer, Reports and Portal. Now the pharmaceutical company can collect business-critical information in real time and compare its performance to competitors’, using the knowledge to figure which products are most profitable. Result: report generation times has been cut from four hours to seconds, ETL (extract-transform and-load) time needed to clean the data has shrunk from 18 hours to 30 minutes, administration costs have been reduced by 50 percent and forecasting time is expected to go down 70 percent.

The Bank of Montreal uses IBM’s DB2 and Information Warehouse software to analyze the data it gathers on several million customers to
help decide product pricing, channel migration, resource planning, etc. The bank expects to save more than $270 million in four years and
anticipates a shift to realtime analysis in a couple of years.

Using BI software from Brio, Toyota Motor Sales USA has reduced its vehicle transport time from 36.5 days to 17.5 days, saving millions.
And significant reductions in time needed for reporting and analysis— thanks to automated exceptionsbased reporting—has enabled Toyota to reassign five analysts to other tasks. It’s all added up to an annual ROI of 605 percent.

ANALYTICS EMBEDDED

“Most companies make the mistake by thinking of CRM analytics as an afterthought,” says Joe Davis, vice president and general manager, PeopleSoft CRM. “Analytics should be embedded into the application, thus enabling intelligent processes and decreasing the complexity of analytic systems.”
To get started, advises Davis, focus on:

• Understanding the specific processes that your organization has automated, and use analytics to identify the areas that are having
  the most impact on the business.
• 
  The key customer metrics that drive your organization’s business.
• 
  How to distribute the insights to the appropriate users, in the appropriate format, within their business processes.

“Organizations that understand their users, and their users’ needs,” says Davis, “will ensure analytic success.”

IBM’S INTERNAL, COMPANYWIDE CRM TRANSFORMATION

IBM’S CRM INITIATIVE is one of the largest to date. When completed in 2005, IBM’s hundreds of thousands of customers, employees and partners will have a single, integrated view of customer information, sharable across applications, time zones, business units, etc.

IBM is using Siebel Systems’ eBusiness applications (more than 80,000 licenses have been purchased), IBM’s DB2 database, WebSphere e-business infrastructure software, MQSeries messaging software and a combination of IBM eServer pSeries systems coupled with an enterprise storage server (sometimes known as Shark).

WHY DO IT?
IBM’s overall goal, says Peter Andino, vice president, global sales operations and technical support, is to ensure that each and every customer interaction is handled with the same degree of excellence using the same tools and data across all IBM geographies and sales channels. This will improve customer satisfaction and encourage collaboration among employees and business units. The company will also reduce the number of internally supported IT systems from about 800 in 1997 to less than 200 by 2006.

WHERE TO BEGIN?
According to Vince Ostrosky, vice president, CRM, the initiative started with a companywide look at how its organization and processes supported (or didn’t support) its customers. The point was to evaluate the effectiveness of each process by asking: “Is the way we do this now the right way, the best way to support the customer?”

WHAT’S THE PLAN?
IBM began with “a careful, measured” initial rollout of Siebel’s call center package to 26 ibm.com call centers. As of October 2003, the system has been deployed in 47 ibm.com call centers in 32 countries. Now the company is tackling marketing and field sales and services; by the end of 2003, IBM will have “CRM-ed” over 40,000 employees in 47 countries.

WHAT’S BEEN LEARNED SO FAR?
Among the key lessons gleaned so far, say Ostrosky and Andino:

• You need genuine support from the top. And make sure you have the support of the executive sales team.
• You must be able to say no. To deliver a truly enterprisewide CRM solution, CIOs have to be firm and just say no to any request for separate CRM solutions.
• CRM is not just an exercise for IT. Without the cooperation of each business unit, an enterprisewide implementation like CRM is not possible. Data integration is key.
• Data is dirtier than you believe. Yes, says IBM, what you feared is true: your data is in much worse condition than you thought. If you want the full benefit of your investment in CRM, start thinking about how to clean it up now.
• Think about the training. You cannot pull frontline people off their posts and stick them in training for weeks at a time; the business units can’t afford to lose the man-hours.
   

WHAT ABOUT THE BENEFITS?
IBM keeps ROI particulars to itself, but they’re substantial and focused on:

• Improved sales productivity, effectiveness and channel integration;
• Increased visibility to market dynamics and the sunsetting of hundreds of non-integrated legacy applications;
• Higher customer satisfaction through better responsiveness and ease of doing business;
• Improved sales management effectiveness, reflected in tighter management and controls and proactive sales coaching;
• Better forecast accuracy and reporting;
• Enhanced partnership management.

CIO Enterprise CRM