Source: Customer Relationship Management

Organization resistance to CRM is unfortunate, but almost inevitable. The organizational issues that companies must tackle to implement CRM include the following:

• CRM may reduce an individual business unit’s contribution, even though the whole company benefits. Current incentive systems work against CRM because they reward only part of the customer’s relationship with the company. Therefore, a sales manager who is evaluated on individual product sales has no vested interest in ensuring that the service organization is meeting the needs of the customer. Most companies today lack financial incentive programs that promote CRM.

• CRM requires making a careful transition from an existing “silo-centric” infrastructure to an integrated customer-centric infrastructure. Over the years, however, large enterprises have built, bought, or inherited a wide variety of customer management applications. Some of this software is proprietary and will be difficult to share across departments.

• Organizations with global operations must manage customer interactions in different languages, time zones, currencies, and regulatory environments. In this environment, providing consistent, customized service is difficult to accomplish using traditional technology.