Get It Together

Integration should be your top CRM goal

Integration should top businesses' CRM priorities lists, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Consulting's conclusions in a study entitled "Multi-Channel Value Quantification." Are businesses' priorities in order? The answer depends on how you ask the question. Companies' awareness that better integration (of front- to back-office and of customer-interaction channels) is important far exceeds what they have budgeted for integration projects.

PwC queried 225 Global 2000 companies from various sectors, 49 percent of which had annual sales of at least $1 billion. It also polled an international base of 225 consumers of various age groups who had experience interacting with large companies. Consumers indicated a stringent requirement that companies be able to resolve their issues quickly, among other demands that required application and process integration to satisfy consistently.

Companies recognize this need for better integration, 71 percent of them stating a need to better integrate back-office applications with front-office ones. Similarly, 64 percent recognize a need to better integrate across customer-interaction channels (such as Web, phone, and in-person). Only 24 percent indicate success in the former and 20 percent report success in the latter. However, the reported success for other CRM endeavors — such as sales force automation, content management, and data warehousing — still falls well below 50 percent.

Despite the fact that 71 percent of companies recognize the need to better integrate front- and back-office systems to better realize their CRM goals, only 24 percent rate that coordination as a budget priority. In an earlier study, Giga Information Group discovered that 15 percent of companies named architecture and integration their top CRM priorities for 2002.

It's not clear whether this disparity between budgets and stated priorities is truly a contradiction. It's been said that CRM integration amounts to opening a vein to an IT consultant, but there's more to integration than application servers, connectors, and other technological solutions.

"Many integration issues are first and foremost people and organizational issues," said Erin Kinikin, vice president and research leader of Enterprise CRM and Marketing & Customer Analysis at Giga. She added that before spending any money on IT integration of CRM systems, you need to answer, "How do you convert a series of departmental silos to an organization that is truly optimized for how the customer wants to do business — instead of just trying to 'connect' and guide customers through arcane company processes?"

Providing the proper incentives for different departments to cooperate, creating process flows that better serve customers, and other such important coordination issues require management decisions that have little or nothing to do with technology.

Kinikin also pointed out that integration is never really finished. Continual changes to the business make it a moving target. Even if you could do it all at once, she said, "integrating 50 years of legacy information and systems will take three to 10 years and tens of millions of dollars (coincidentally making it a consultant's dream project)." The upshot, Kinikin concludes, is that "companies need to use their CRM goals to prioritize integration to get the biggest return."

— Jeanette Burriesci

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