Is CRM Harmful to Your Business?

Wikipedia defines Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in part as:

"…a widely implemented strategy for managing a company's interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. …The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service."

What could possibly be wrong with that?

There are, of course, occasional system implementation over-runs. There are Tales of Horror from the Database Crypt. And there are cases of excessive paperwork created by overly zealous system designers and administrators.

But there is another, deeper issue: the qualitative impact of CRM on customer relationships.

The Case of the Surprised Client

A professional services client of mine does a very good job tracking customer information. One dataset they track is the level of customer satisfaction on a number of criteria. One criterion is customer satisfaction with the client's timeliness and effectiveness of providing financial information, and the other is satisfaction with timeliness and effectiveness of providing project information.