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customer   self‑  service

’.

Despite the benefits of CRM described in this chapter, it must be stressed that failure 

rates are high. Research conducted independently in 2000 by analysts Gartner and the Butler 

Group suggested that around 60 to 70% of CRM projects fail (Mello, 2001). This is not nec-

essarily indicative of weaknesses in the CRM concept, rather it indicates the difficulty of 

implementing a complex information system that requires substantial changes to organisa-

tions’ processes and has major impacts on the staff. Such failure rates occur in many other 

information systems projects. In addition to the change management issues (discussed in 

Chapter 10), key technical issues for managers selecting e-CRM systems are: