By Vera Lang

Over 80% of owners & managers of small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) who are adopting Customer Relationship Management (CRM) say that their biggest challenge is to get staff to use the CRM software.” highlights a recent survey by Really Simple Systems.

Purchasing decisions are critical for CRM implementation success. Really Simple Systems, as a provider of CRM software On Demand, observed that often companies choose an application based on its features over ease of use. Later on, these companies discover that those extra features hinder usability. Really Simple Systems observed that “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.”

The companies themselves seem to agree. 72% of the respondents surveyed said that they would be prepared to trade functionality in their CRM systems for ease of use. This again indicates an “increasing desire for CRM products that provide core functionality in an easy to use package rather than solutions which in their attempts to tick all the boxes, predictably, become unwieldy”, concludes Really Simple Systems.

The source of the problem is also identified in the study. Companies should allot more cloud to
CRM in the planning stage to be able to realize very significant CRM benefits. Stronger management endorsement and allocation of sufficient resourcing will have great result, as 67% of responding small-medium sized businesses said that finding time to evaluate CRM systems was a major issue.

Other interesting research findings:
* 43% of respondents use less than half of their existing CRM system’s functionality
* For 51% of responding SME companies synchronizing data is a major issue.

Despite all these challenges, CRM can offer major benefits to SME – SME being defined as small to medium-sized business with 5-200 sales staff. This is particularly true for web-based CRM software which is most suitable to companies with multiple locations and sales people who work remotely or at home.

This CRM study involved 500 companies. Results were reported end November 2007.