Amaury H. Aguila asked:

Many companies often fail to achieve real success with their CRM projects, causing several negative impacts to their business, including slower time to market, failure to achieve a return on investments and customer dissatisfaction.

There may be various factors that provoke failure in CRM strategies, but one of the most common is the lack of software customization. Popular CRM software is what is known as “general purpose”. Industrial, commercial, service companies can use this software; restaurants, electronics shops, cinemas can use this software; Michael, Steve and Susan can use this software; anyone can use this software, and they’ll find it useful. That’s what being of “general purpose” is.

But what would happen if that popular CRM software wasn’t general purpose anymore? Every company or individual would need a fully customized application. This way, if MangoShack needs to provide management for 7,000,000 customers, but only needs management for 3-5 providers, they would get optimized software that would handle this situation perfectly.

That last example is just one of the millions of possible combinations we can encounter involving thousands of factors influencing a company’s need… General purpose CRM software isn’t enough.

That’s why companies implementing a CRM solution without customized software tend to fail. They invest hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars buying software and training their employees to use this software, without knowing they should have invested in customizing it before implementation.

As the responsible person for your company’s success, I recommend you not to implement a CRM solution without thinking before: will this CRM software fully integrate into our company’s need?