Approach to Overcome Existing Limitations for CRM Implementation

The following research report presents the results of studies on CRM solutions and proposes a new approach to overcome identified limitations of CRM implementations. This paper is based on work that has been carried out in a EU founded project on innovative solutions to improve the management of customer relationship and complements previous research of the =mcminstitute in this field. Derived from the identified research gap regarding failures of CRM a market study was carried out among CRM software producers and vendors. Hereby we differentiated in four different perspectives: business, process, functionality and infrastructure. The aim of this differentiation is to better locate the problems of today’s CRM solutions for the different layers within a company. Our main conclusion is that business requirements of today’s companies do not fit with the nowadays CRM solutions. Control, data sharing, multi-modal access, analysis and process flexibility are not supported sufficiently. Based on the research results a first approach for innovative CRM middleware is presented