A necessary evil

Good customer relationship management presents businesses with real benefits, albeit at a cost. In an era of diminishing personal contact, Matt Foskett discovers that businesses are turning more to software to monitor and maintain relationships with their clients

Customer relationship management software is viewed as the nearest thing the world of IT has to a 'Holy Grail'. Ideally, CRM would mean that delighted customers will be retained, forever loyal and no cross-selling opportunity will ever be missed, while the flexibility of the software means it will continue delivering value.

However, the reality of many CRM projects has been very different. Instead of gaining customers, it has lost them. The workforce has refused to co-operate with the deployment