'Why CRM is like love' - Gartner

Businesses need to understand good customer service does not begin or end with the purchase of a CRM solution, according to Gartner.

It may seem obvious but too many companies are failing to understand the complexity of the good customer service jigsaw in which technology is just one - albeit important - piece.

More than 70 per cent of CEOs currently rank building customer relations as their most important task, according to Gartner analyst Scott Nelson. "Yet they tell me they're not doing CRM," he added. "They think CRM is a technology. CRM is not a new concept. The term may be a decade old but it goes back hundreds of years."

Companies, increasingly under pressure to grow, are now looking to improve their CRM through a greater use of technology. But according to Nelson many are approaching the task in the wrong way.

Speaking at the Gartner CRM Summit in London, he said: "Companies I speak to ask me 'what vendor should I buy?'. They want to jump straight to the technology but it's impossible to answer that question without knowing what other building blocks are in place."

Nelson said businesses must ensure a number of vital building blocks are present.

First must come a vision, said Nelson. Any company must know why it wants to do CRM and what it is hoping to achieve. And this vision must be underpinned by a strategy for making it become a reality.

Likewise a company must ensure it understands all its core processes, what data it needs and what that data means. The quality and the relevance of the data will be a more telling differentiator than any amount of technology bought on a whim, according to Gartner.

A company must also put in place a clear framework for organisational collaboration to ensure silos within the business are broken down. As long as information and resources reside in silos the company will always be hamstrung, said Nelson.

And finally a company must understand what metrics it needs to judge its success. Only with all these factors in mind should a business consider what technology can best complement those other building blocks, said Nelson.

Bryn Jones, director of business architecture at Virgin Mobile, said his own company has scooped a number of customer service awards because it has prioritised many of these building blocks over the technology it uses.

He said: "Our core CRM is built around a seven-year-old system. That is not the thing which is making the difference."

Jones added there are far more fundamental things a company must worry about before the bells and whistles of technology. "You cannot provide great customer satisfaction if you've got a duff product," he said. "Below the product, the processes you have in place must be designed from the customer's point of view."

This includes everything from simplifying the number of hoops customers must jump through to ensuring the language used is appropriate. The best website in the world and the best back-end CRM could easily be undone by what Jones calls "corporate bollocks".

He added: "If people understand what you've said they shouldn't have to call back."