Recent conversations with some of our business partners - those that sell Sage CRM to our customers - suggests they are still finding some of their customer's back office (finance systems) remain unconnected to their front office (marketing, sales & service) functions.
It's a missed opportunity as we have noted on this site numerous times over the years. Integrating data & processes is where CRM delivers the magic and brings to life a complete (CRM) strategy. Not having joined up processes & widely shared, useful, data can impact negatively, and significantly, on customer satisfaction externally & transactional costs internally.
These same business partners report that many of their customers use different software applications in different departments to manage customer information. And it is often the case that core data (for example, customer names, etc.) often varies between the front and back-office systems, leading to questions of data correctness and, more worryingly, issues around the correctness of the holding of customer information.
Even though some front-office applications offer some level of cross-department working, back-office applications (i.e., the finance systems) often remain locked away, with the finance teams slow to open up data and applications to other departments.
Those companies that maintain this divide suffer cost & experience impacts - administrative overhead, inefficiencies & verbal sign-off requirements plus process duplication. These factors can leave employee stakeholders, hoping for great things from a CRM strategy, feeling under whelmed by software systems particularly where it impacts interactions with customers.