Businesses face an impossible situation. The only long-term solution to the customer service crisis is information. Companies know this. That's why the vast majority of respondents to the InfoWorld CRM Survey, almost 78 percent, rate CRM as critically important to their business. P.J., you may wonder what these businesspeople know that you don't.
Every company presents a different combination of client and back-end applications.
CRM must gather data from all of these applications, process it, and feed it back to reps and managers. A CRM project can't disrupt existing operations, and what's more, it must usually make use of resources already in place. Forty percent of our survey respondents say they want an integrated, single-vendor solution. Sixty-nine percent rated integration with existing systems as critical or very important. And 63 percent want the flexibility of a Web-based front end.