You get to watch them kick the tires, take a test ride, or taste a free sample. And they get to tell you what they think about those same luscious wares. What may be coming in over the virtual transom is not being folded into the information coming in from other customer sources. And the results can cause huge discrepancies or gaps with the actual customer data. At risk are not only current customer relationships, but identifying and capturing future ones - a.k.a. market growth.
Internal convergence is another point of concern.
Not all CRM systems unite front and back offices into functional account management solutions. Orders will come in instantly but the pallets in the warehouse will remain empty, waiting for the supply-chain conga line to kick in. What we have here is a failure to communicate. And the result is the false perception that accumulated data trends are accurate representatives of what customers are saying and seeing. After all, the technology that creates these huge analytic matrixes, tracking buying profiles and market trends, doesn't lie.