Survey reveals poor CRM technology usage among large companies

This is the conclusion of a survey carried out recently by Advantage Software Factory of 100 companies operating in financial, real estate, IT and telecom. However, 90% of the respondents said they stored complete information on customers and keep request history.

The survey revealed that the least used tool in customer relationship strategies is the flow for approving personalized offers. Only 9% of the surveyed said they use a transparent circuit of approving customized offers. In case of the other companies, offers for certain clients are made rather secretly, after informal negotiation between the agent and sales director.

The disadvantage resulting from this practice and the poor use of this tool consists in the failure of creating a know-how on personalized offers and hence to underlie a monopolization of this practice. It is practically inhibiting the possibility of imposing a set of guidelines or standards for managing personalized or more delicate offers.

“Even though CRM technologies assist companies in the decision-making process, by providing short-term sales forecasts, sales force efficiency or customer relationship management, Romanian companies still favor the “one-stop-database” approach to CRM technologies. Sales agents and technical support agents haven’t yet acknowledged the fact that this is not an activity monitoring tool, but an instrument to improve efficiency of their activity. But on the other hand, neither managers use CRM technologies to the fullest so as to extract data that could improve customer relationship analysis, both after-sales and in a proactive manner”, said Marian Stirbescu, Sales and Market Manager Advantage Software Factory.