Establishing a practical, outside-in vision of your business from your customer can enable you to stay up with newly emerging needs and wants and to overcome any myths you currently have that impact your effectiveness.
It's very easy to rely on beliefs or assumptions about customers? What they want, what they don't want? Perhaps these were once valid, but have now changed. Why not ask the customer?
What does a management team argue amongst themselves about? Why not ask the customer directly?

These are all things that beg market research, in order to overcome mistaken or outdated beliefs. Although there is no substitute for research with your actual customers, a start is to look at a few customer myths.

• The Ten Common Myths

CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organised way. For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth.
According to one industry view, CRM consists of:

Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns with clear goals and objectives, and generate quality leads for the sales team.

• Assisting the organisation to improve telesales, account, and sales management by optimising information shared by multiple employees, and streamlining existing processes (for example, taking orders using mobile devices)
• Allowing the formation of individualised relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximising profits; identifying the most profitable customers and providing them the highest level of service.
• Providing employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers, understand their needs, and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.

CRM is a term coined in the 1990s to describe a system whereby every contact with a customer could be recorded and analysed. Like many buzzwords, the term CRM now stand for pretty well whatever each vendor of CRM systems wants it to, whether it is systems for sales people (Sales Force Automation, Opportunity Management), for marketing people (Marketing Automation, Campaign Management), Helpdesks (Customer Service and Support), email and voice logging, and so on.
CRM systems were the must-have products at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000/2001. There followed a few years of disillusionment as expensive systems were late and then failed to deliver the results to meet the raised expectations of the users. The Gartner Group, a US firm of analysts, have a Hype Cycle graph showing the traditional pattern of a slow start, followed by unjustified euphoria, down to disillusionment and back to a level of realisable sanity.

CRM, in its original meaning is not about software or systems, it's about the way a company interacts with its customers through its people and its culture. No computer system will change the way people interact with customers, it can at best simply help them do what they want to do more efficiently. But assuming that your sales, service, delivery and support people are competent and treat customers like customers, a properly chosen and implemented CRM system will bring sales and service efficiencies to your organisation.

Whatever your goal, there are fundamental factors that will be critical to the success of your CRM system. Broadly speaking these can be divided into

• Getting the design right,
• Choosing the right system,
• Getting the adoption right and
• Avoiding the pitfalls.