The challenges of implementing CRM in the financial services industry

Abstract

Customer Relationship Management means great opportunities and great challenges for those who want to pursue a broad implementation. Despite investing millions of dollars in CRM initiatives, many companies are facing the frustration of failure. After considerable efforts, many financial services companies are simply not getting back the return they expected when they initiated CRM projects. We believe that blaming technology, project managers or simply characterizing CRM as "treacherous illusions" is not the answer. We discuss the challenges of implementing CRM under a strategic and managerial approach, focusing on relevant issues and showing that CRM can deliver value to financial services companies. After analyzing some reasons for CRM failures, we provide some recommendations to increase chances of implementation success. Technology plays a secondary role when it comes to finding reasons for CRM failures. Strategic alignment, organizational change and clear understanding of CRM goals seam to play a much important role to guarantee the success of CRM initiatives. The study was based on the experience of the authors, who had considerable experience in the financial services industry and with CRM implementations, on literature reviews and interviews with professors and professionals from the financial services industry.