Articles Review

Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

Executive Summary

Customer relationship management (CRM), is a date and information management system that integrates planning, scheduling and the control of pre-sale and post-sale activities within businesses. It helps combine technology and business strategy to support business and customer relationships, and to help businesses develop and implement go-to-market strategies The review is about obtaining mutual understanding the success and failure of CRM. Although CRM has been one of the fastest growing businesses methods of the new millennium, critics point to the high failure rate of the CRM projects as evidenced by commercial market studies. The purpose of the review is to investigate success and failures of CRM system implementations. By studying the two articles which discussing on success-failure of CRM, we found that by understanding the CRM system, we could prevent the potential failure and optimize the system at its the best. It is organization priority to understand the basis before implementing the system. A good CRM will really benefit the organization and it is dynamic, change and grows over time and usage.

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

Article Review Both articles relates on Customer Relation Management (CRM), CRM system, application of CRM, Critical Success Factor (CSF). The interesting story in this article is the investigation on failures and success of the CRM. If the company planned the projects well by considering all the criteria, people, the company and external suppliers and work as a team, the project will be successful and vice versa. Furthermore, the project also can be considered as failed if it is over the budget. The first article is based on CRM. The CRM system is defined as the technological business management tool. It is done due to customer segmentation, to maintain relationship, and to know the way to handle unprofitable customer, customize market offering and promotional efforts.

There are two types of CRM which is operational CRM and analytical CRM. Operational CRM is a direct contact with the customer. They face their customer to get the feedback whether it is good or not about their product. Example like when PERODUA called the customer back to get their feedback on the services. Analytical CRM is based on technologies and customer information such as data. Physical resources, informational resources and organisational resources is also needed to implement CRM.

Based on Payne and Frow (in Foss, Stone, Ekinci, 2008), they state that the implementation of CRM should success based on 4 critical factors which are CRM readiness assessment, CRM change management, CRM project management and employee engagement. CRM readiness means the overview audit by the managers. The managers need to view overall position in order to implement the CRM. CRM change management objective is to change the culture and strategic organizational of the company. CRM project management can be implemented by involving all teams and need all employee to involve and support the management for employee engagement.

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

There are 7 reasons why the CRM failed. The first reason is they view CRM as technology initiative. Second reason is due to lack of customer-centric vision. Furthermore, the insufficient gratitude of customer lifetime value. Moreover, the top management did not fully support the CRM implementation may effect the result. By underestimate the impportance of change management can also give the bad result. The other factor is due to failed to re-engineer bussiness process. Moreover, underestimating the difficulties involved in data mining also can failed the CRM.

The second articles is focus more on CRM and Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP). This journal is more focus on how to manage customer relationship effectively with strictly focus on CSF factors. CRM is more based on customer behaviour. More personal relationship between customer can be form based on analyzing on CRM. CRM is the front-line staff. They are the one who make interaction with customer. While ERP is the back-office staff which focus on supply and demand for key resources. They are more involved in internal process than facing the customer itself. In this journal, they listed top 10 ERP CSFs which are : 1. Top management support 2. project team competence 3. interdepartmental cooperation 4. clear goals and objectives 5. project management 6. interdepartmental communication 7. management expectation 8. project champion 9. vendor support 10. careful package selection

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

And for CSFs for CRM are listed as below :

1. top management support 2. communication of CRM strategy 3. knowledge management capability 4. willingness to share data 5. willingness to change processes 6. technological readiness 7. culture change/customer orientation 8. process change capability 9. system integration capability

Customer relationship management is an information industry terms for methodologies, software, and usually internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. It entails all aspects of interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or self-related. A key to CRM success is getting on accurate expectation of what it is, and what it can and cant deliver. The first reason which leads CRM is clear and definable goals and expectations. Leading a CRM effort starts with looking at the company as customers do. Top executives should take steps such as answering an ad, calling its toll-free number for service, placing an order, and signing up to get emails. In a successful initiative, the entire company will be deepening its ability to see better from the customer's point of view. These mechanisms are required to carefully quantify the business case for CRM effort. The feedback that will be gathered will document eventual progress. It's critical to develop objectives that are measurable, and have key performance metrics in place. The second reason is to gather requirements carefully. The business units and the IT department must agree on what customer-related data is needed, where it will come from, and how it will be gathered and distributed. It's critical to prioritize the order in which business areas, 4

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

such as marketing, sales and service, will be addressed. It may be wise to have executives from the marketing, sales and service areas be on a CRM committee, as they lead the teams that will benefit most from the CRM effort. This is the time to re-engineer the business processes with the optimal customer experience in mind. It's also an opportunity to increase procedural effectiveness and reduce costs. For instance, a well-thought-out system can eliminate and reduce the duplicate manual entry of customer data. Motivation and training people also the key reason for a success CRM. It will be natural for employees to resist change. They have procedures and processes they're already familiar with. Salespeople, especially, tend to have their own individual systems for doing their jobs, from notebooks to index cards to PDA's. It's important to consult with employees, get their feedback, and constantly show each of them how they will benefit from the changes. People give up familiar processes if they see there's something better ahead. Training must be accessible and ongoing. The most important time for training is in the months after deployment. The other reason is ensure quality data. It is needed that everyone focuses on the need for accurate, complete data. Emphasizing to employees that great customer data is the key to unlocking customer value. Showing each person how they will benefit. Making everyone aware of how marketing campaigns can be monitored more effectively, more accurate sales forecasts can come together more quickly, and add-on sales will be easier. Setting clear standards for data quality, communicating them widely making someone the champion of clean data and devising a plan for checking and maintaining data to ensure it is accurate and clean is important. However the CRM could go wrong if the strategy does not well managed. A business leader needs to be in charge of the CRM effort, not IT. Successful CRM is a major business initiative, not a technology initiative. CRM strategy and vision needs to define what customers experience at each touch point, and how will they be handled at each touch point. The vision needs to be clear to everyone. A major pitfall occurs when business constituents have differing expectations of CRM's benefits. Sharing a common vision is the key. CRM is sometimes seen as 5

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

a lower level automation step or patch, rather than a top level re-thinking of how customers are served. CRM strategy and business strategy need complete alignment. It's critical to review plan to measure key performance indicators, and return of investment. Can metrics truly determine the real business value of effort? The quality of metrics has been a deciding factor in making or breaking many CRM projects. Implementation error leads to CRM failure. CRM projects often have focused on some parts of the customer experience, but ran into trouble when they were unable to link with or serve well all parts of the customer experience. In addition, introducing CRM to hundreds of employees at a time inhibit the process. It's easy to want to do too much, too fast. Companies should get it right first with a small team of employees chosen to represent a cross-section of company. Choosing an initial project that can make a dramatic difference, with clear key performance indicators is important. Strong pilot results will help avoiding the next pitfall. Focusing too much on the new technologies and processes rather than focusing first on the people who will use them successfully. Employee excitement is needed about doing a better job for customers, employee feedback and overall buy-in must not be forgotten. Depending too much on technologies will cause the CRM to failure. As implementation gets underway, key data can turn up in salespeople's PDA's, spreadsheets, handwritten notes, and legacy systems. To avoid surprise integration nightmares, the requirements gathering stage needs to be careful and thorough. And, different CRM solutions are in place but do not work well together. Often marketing, sales and service departments already have different types of CRM software, from different vendors, to track the same customers. As a result, these departments can't share data, and have redundant support and administration costs. All of companies' activities are purely for the satisfaction of their customers, and it is considered as one of the main terms of survival in the market. Marketing is an important part of any organization to achieve goals in this way of communication with the customer is one of the key principles of marketing and for a student of management understanding the concepts and 6

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

techniques of marketing strategies that are described in this article is very interesting. If you best product, but the customer is not satisfied, you will not succeed in your business. CRM is a collection of the art of communicating with the customer to find his needs, improving them and at a glance Customer Relationship Management is the biggest advantage for an organization. In these articles we examine the critical success factors and they are divided in the six categories of strategy, tactics, technology, processes, culture and people. Each organization has certain method of marketing which CRM is one of the most efficient of these methods that by changing the culture of an organization leads to improve the performance of different parts of the organization.it can be the best recommendation for companies in part of marketing although CRM has always not been successful, and many companies have failed in the CRM implementation the reasons for its failure was the lack of proper use of CRM. CRM implementation requires the application of other management tools such as ERP. (ERP although not necessary for CRM) CRM will be useful to customers, suppliers, and employees when its underlying such as a data warehouse and ERP is provided and available. The articles presents some methods of marketing which contribute to mutual understanding of the concepts customer relationship and communication, the difference between social and economic exchange, success and failure of CRM system, simulation of CRM system and nowadays, why organization are customer- centric. According to the articles, the advantages in applying successful implementation of CRM, the organizations can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and attract more sales.

By understanding the factors and reasons behind the success and failures of CRM systems, we can overcome and avoid mishaps or potential failures in advance to optimize the usage of the system at its best. To make this happen, the organization implementing the system must at first understand the basis of creating a CRM system and understand the basis behind the customer information required. Only through this the organization can understand customers better and do better analysis for better customer relationship approach. 7

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

Even through the information provided through these two articles, further information on CRM needs to be studied and analyzed. The success and failures of CRM implementation based on different industry implementation needs to be studied further. The information required for a product based company may be different from the information required by a company which is more service oriented. In addition, further studies can be carried out to identify the level of need for an organization to implement CRM or ERP system. As addressed in the articles, among the factors which contribute to failures in CRM implementation is the readiness of the company itself to implement the system. This readiness involves a lot of aspects to understand in advance. Therefore, only with this further understanding the company can choose either to implement or not, or make sure the organization is ready prior to implementing the system.

Articles Review
Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008 King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)

References 1. Fross, Bryan, Merlin Stone, and Yuksel Ekinci. "What Makes for CRM System Success or Failure?" (2008) 2. King, Stephen F., and Thomas F. Burgess. "Understanding Success and Failure in Customer Relationship Management." (2007)