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Letter From the Editor
Claudio Marcus
5 August 2002
In recent years, the customer relationship management (CRM) message has reached far and wide. The promised benefits of CRM — enhanced customer satisfaction and retention, having a positive impact on customer revenue and potential profitability — are a powerful lure. As is so often the case, however, realizing those benefits has proved to be extremely challenging. Many enterprises that jumped on the CRM bandwagon have found that they have not even come close to achieving the results they expected, and more than a few CRM deployments have resulted in outright failure.
Technology is indeed a key enabler of CRM and should not be blamed for CRM's unrealized potential. CRM providers — both application vendors and external service providers (ESPs) — do, however, bear at least some of the responsibility. Many providers have hyped the benefits of CRM, and of course their own offerings, without emphasizing that effective CRM demands far more than technology. Of course, software vendors and ESPs are to be expected to act in their own best interests. It is their enterprise customers that are often at fault, because they fail to recognize that CRM is a comprehensive business strategy that requires a deep understanding of and commitment to its principles. Effective CRM demands that enterprises become more customer-centric, literally changing the way that they do business — not just implementing CRM-related applications and other technologies.
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