eCentric Media Best Practice White Paper               Critical CRM Decisions - Choosing Your CRM Systems Integration Specialist   Also Available In PDF                                                                                            Print-Friendly Version

  You are about to embark on perhaps one of the most important projects your company has ever
  undertaken. You want to improve the management of your customer relationships. You want to attain the
  fabled 360-degree customer centric view and achieve the ROI that follows.

  You have a plan in place. You have management and user buy-in. You know you need to take a holistic view
  of business processes, systems integration, data movement and provision along with staff training. You
  have done the rounds of vendor selection and know the technology you wish to implement. You’ve done the
  costing. You’ve factored in that customisation is going to take somewhere between 5 and 10 times the
  out-of-the-box ¹ cost of your CRM solution.

  Now you just need to find someone to help implement it.

The 'Scary' Statistics

  do most CRM projects fail?

  A few years ago, the often-publicised figures quoted CRM projects as extremely likely to fail. Reports of
  anything up to an 80% failure rate were common². These days, those same surveys report a much-
  improved situation. The $76.3 billion industry,³ and those practising within it have matured. Lessons have
  been learnt, best practice formulated and now the majority of CRM projects do achieve their stated
  objectives, demonstrate business benefits and do bring a return on investment.⁴

  Most projects that fail do so for entirely preventable reasons and more often than not these are nothing to
  with the tool set chosen or the specialists chosen to perform the integration. Failure is more likely to stem
  from age-old internal corporate problems of vision, commitment and planning.⁵

Aren’t All Integration Specialists The Same?

  With well over 500 Systems Integration Specialists operating in just the CRM industry, choosing the right
  one for your programme is a daunting choice. Even if you already have your technology identified, you may
  still find a dozen or more ‘Integration Partners’ promoted by your software vendor.

  making the choice

  With such a variety of potential CRM Systems Integration Consultancies it is hardly surprising to find there
  are pitfalls to watch out for. This paper aims to draw attention to these, helping you make an informed
  choice and enabling a selection process that benefits your project rather than the software vendor or the
  Systems Integration Specialist.



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