SME staff resistant to CRM


30 Nov 2007

Four fifths of senior executives cite employee resistance to using customer relationship management (CRM) software as the biggest hurdle they face when implementing the technology, a survey has found.

Really Simple Systems, which provides hosted CRM software, surveyed 500 users of this technology in the UK encompassing SME owners, directors and sales, marketing and IT managers.

Some 82.9pc said getting the staff to use the software was their biggest challenge.

The survey also found that 71.9pc of the respondents said they would be prepared to trade functionality in their CRM systems for ease of use.

“Too often companies make purchasing decisions for applications based on features, not ease of use, and then find that those extra features get in the way of usability,” remarked John Paterson, CEO, Really Simple Systems. “CRM adoption has always been an issue and the solution is to make the software easy to use, not more complex. Companies need to make sure that simplicity is as important a factor as functionality when choosing CRM systems.

“That nearly three quarters of the people we surveyed are prepared to trade functionality in their CRM systems for ease of use is indicative of an increasing desire for CRM products to provide core functionality in an easy-to-use package rather than solutions which in their attempts to tick all the boxes become unwieldy.”

The survey also found that 42.9pc of respondents use less than half of their existing CRM system’s functionality, 50.5pc said synchronising data was a major issue and 67.1pc said finding time to evaluate CRM systems was a major problem.

By Niall Byrne