Formulating and Implementing a Customer-Centric Strategy

by Ram Reddy

Recently, the high failure rates of customer relationship management (CRM) technology implementation have gotten a lot of coverage. Some sources cite failure rates as high as 70% in CRM system implementation. Even after successful technology implementation, CRM systems do not necessarily deliver the promised business benefits. CRM systems were hailed as the enabling technology to attract and retain profitable customers, but the difficulty in implementing them caused serious disillusionment about their efficacy. The major reason for the CRM implementation failures was not the technology, however -- it was the absence of a customer-centric (CC) strategy.