Many organizations employing CRM strategies share customer data across many parts of a marketing organization, according to survey results released yesterday by Harte-Hanks Inc., a provider of customer relationship management and related marketing services.
The survey found that 70 percent of respondents provide inside salespeople with access to customer data as part of their CRM solutions. Other areas that benefit from an enterprisewide approach are customer service/tech support (67 percent); outside/field sales (59 percent); marketing communications (51 percent); accounting/finance (41 percent); product marketing (41 percent); and call centers (40 percent).
The survey also found that 15 percent of CRM programs, either currently in place or being built, provide at least some access to customer information to channel partners and suppliers, such as companies that support transactions or are co-marketing partners.
Among those sites planning to build CRM solutions during the next 12 months, 94 percent plan to provide CRM access to customer service/tech support, and 85 percent plan to provide access to the inside sales team.
Increasingly, businesses are turning to outside companies to provide programming support and commercial CRM packages as they look to accomplish their CRM objectives, the survey reported. Seventeen percent of surveyed companies use a strictly inhouse solution. The remaining respondents use either exclusively outsourced solutions (44 percent) or a combination of inhouse and outsourced programming solutions (39 percent).
An earlier Harte-Hanks survey, conducted online and released in January, showed that 26 percent were using an exclusively inhouse solution at the time.
The market intelligence team of Harte-Hanks, San Antonio, conducted the survey by telephone in May. Nearly 300 North American companies implementing CRM programs were surveyed.
