An initial approach for Improving CRM systems implementation projects

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can be very valuable tools for enterprises, but it is known that their implementation projects are prone to risks and failures. This motivates the need for studying the reasons of such a situation, and for designing future CRM implementation methods that are better prepared for the task in hand. Rather than just thinking from anew, and pretending to design a completely new method from scratch, we believe that there already exist methods and tools, developed for other related areas, that may become good referents of practices that could be considered and integrated into a future CRM implementation method. In this paper we first describe succinctly the main issues surrounding CRM implementation projects, such as their typical critical success factors, organizational issues and nature of such projects. Then we present the set of selected practices that can be combined and integrated into a CRM implementation process. Thus, this paper presents a first approximation to what may be a future CRM implementation methodology that involves the aforementioned practices and supports the professionals involved in this kind of implementation project.