Every year at this time I head off to a week long conference to spend time with a room full of colleagues that evangelize CRM in their respective markets.  I love attending this event because it gives me the opportunity to talk to people that are in the same mind set and a great sounding board when it comes to discussing the issues of the day.  There is no better venue to test my perceptions of issues and challenges in the CRM space and to get validation from my peers.  The side benefit is that my peers and I get a better understanding from the software manufacturer's regarding their perceptions as well.

When I started writing this blog the intent was always to give a real world approach and to give advice in a practical way.  Being here for a week I tried to take a high level view to get my thoughts together and communicate what I learned.  If you would have asked me what I thought I would be writing about I would have come up with a completely different response. 

The biggest bombshell that I found is the disconnect between the rush to CRM 2.0 and how little that has to do with what the man on the street and what they need to succeed.  CRM adoption still continues to be the big gotcha that all technology consulting firms like the one I work for.  Many of my colleagues in the industry feel the same way.  So I decided to air some of our grievances related to how CRM technology breaks with CRM culture.

The good news is that the core challenges with CRM adoption are not the same issues we faced 5 or 10 years ago.  The bad news is that there continues to be more and more barriers to realizing user adoption because more variables continue to be introduced into the market place.  Here are my top 5 deal breakers as I see them.

1.  Works the Way I Do - There is a lot of marketing and spin from a number of publishers about CRM working the way people do.  Well, here is a tip then.  Regardless of how much we claim to have internet access around the clock the reality is that we don't.  If we really want people to use CRM then give them ALL of CRM on my desktop/laptop regardless of my connectivity.  I don't want paired down functionality or to have to make choices about which customers I can cache and carry.

2.  Works Like Everything Else I Use - No offense to any developers out there but if you think that having 5 to 10 screens pop up in a 30 to 60 minute session of using a CRM application is "acceptable" you are out of your mind.  There is no technology in use today in corporate America that pleasures the user with pop up after pop up.  It does not happen in Word or Excel and it does not happen when I buy something from Amazon.com.  Enough said, I think you get the frustration of CRM users.

3. Mobile is Mobile - Here we go back to the same concepts that relate to how people work.  Don't shrink an application into a browser and then call it a mobile CRM application.  The point of being mobile and using CRM is so that I can work (yes, even sometimes we don't always have 5 bars of signal strength) in a plane, train, or automobile no matter what connectivity happens to be.  Internet accessible mobile is not mobile CRM.

4. As Reliable as the Toilet - The overwhelming frustration of people using technology as part of making a living is that there can be no question about the stability and reliability of the application.  Think about it.  What if your toilet worked successfully most of the time.  How ugly would that get?  People that wake up and get introduced to a piece of technology need to know that it will work with all the common tools most likely to be on any given desktop in big or small companies.  Outlook is the best example I can think of.

5.  Don't Penalize the User - Once people are introduced to CRM they should be given less and less manual duties in the technology over time.  It is amazing that as people put in more and better information they are almost always penalized by being hit with more and more duties as it relates to CRM.  No one woke up today and said "I hope my entire day is taken up with meaningless data entry that has nothing to do with my job function."  If we don't grasp the use of process automation and workflow soon our users will just flat out revolt or go find somewhere else to work.

Off to the airport now but I hope that people that design and publish technology take some of these things to heart.  It was a good week with lots of learning and lots of laughs.