"This can be achieved as both an enterprise transformation approach, or incrementally, by adopting a 'wrap and renew' strategy, complementing existing systems and breaking down silos between existing technologies. Either approach delivers substantial operational and customer service benefits, quickly and cost-effectively," Bethke concludes.

The Need for Flexibility

The survey found major differences within the individual geographies. For example:

• Compared to European counterparts, a higher proportion of U.S. respondents (28% vs. 10%) see existing systems as hindering rather than helping to improve customer service.

• In identifying the challenges companies face in achieving their objectives, UK respondents see the need to improve CRM systems as especially important (27%, compared the average of 19%). At the same time, in France an overwhelming 50% of respondents put the need to reduce operational spend far ahead of any other concern.

• In France and Spain, the highest number of respondents (35% and 34% respectively) identified revenue/profit growth as the top business objective, compared to just 19% in Germany.

• Germany was the only country to confirm reducing customer churn (31%) as more important than revenue/profit growth, which fell to fourth most important, behind recruiting new customers (26%) and growing existing accounts (23%).

• In identifying the challenges companies face in achieving their objectives, UK respondents see the need to improve CRM systems as especially important (27%, compared the average of 19%). At the same time, in France an overwhelming 50% of respondents put the need to reduce operational spend far ahead of any other concern.

"A wide variation in responses within countries with similar economies has profound implications on selecting the most appropriate CRM solution for a multi-national business," says Eric Deitert, director of customer experience transformation marketing at Pegasystems. "Traditional, monolithic, code-based and data-centric CRM systems simply do not have the flexibility to adapt to these differing requirements, and cannot deliver uniformly high-quality customer response across disparate geographies. By contrast, Pegasystems' process-driven Customer Process Manager adopts a highly agile, situational approach. Because it is built on the Pegasystems' award-winning SmartBPM platform, it is in fact an easy-to-customize framework that can dynamically adapt to individual local requirements." (continued...)

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