Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
In the fast moving, ever changing e-business environment, agility and responsiveness are critical success factors to survival and growth. It used to be said that the Big ate the Small, now it is the Fast that eat the Slow. How often do we refer to a small business when we are recollecting a good customer service experience? One possible reason is that within a small business the three areas of Sales Marketing and Service are closely integrated, as they are often all within the same person's remit.
Larger businesses struggle to have effective integration across their organizations. They have invested heavily in tools like ERP, to provide a backbone of information through the company, and have now moved on to CRM-type tools to provide the communication and integration of information across the business to deliver synergy. However, as we saw in the article on "Benchmarking CRM operations", the number of businesses, able to provide an integrated system like that found within a successful smaller business, was at best less than 30%.
Given the importance of cross-business working in today's environment, why has this issue of integration across the business become such a problem?
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