Although the percentage of companies increasing IT budgets dropped from 70% to 32.4% in 2002, this market sector is still very interested in customer relationship management (CRM), reports BMI-TechKnowledge.
BMI-T expects the overall SA IT market to maintain a growth rate of 10.1% in 2002 and 11.2% in 2003, passing R57 million by 2006.
Globally, the CRM market experienced dramatically diminished growth in 2001, but this is expected to begin picking up again by 2003 and is set to experience a compound annual growth rate of 12.4 %, reaching $11.5 billion by 2006.
BMI-T is completing its CRM corporate user market report, which will be available next month.
"Regardless of the negative perceptions around CRM, research conducted earlier this year indicates that implementations are still going through, in response to the need for improved customer service, a priority high on the corporate agenda, and at a slightly higher rate than most other enterprise resource management areas," says Craig Kolb, BMI-T analyst and report author.
"Our research will include key information on whether corporate users have more business-focused definitions of CRM than before, driven by the realisation that business strategy and competent management are just as important as the software in solving customer satisfaction problems. At the end of the day a relationship is about communicating, keeping promises and being sincere. Just throwing money into an IT solution is a half-hearted attempt at improving relationships with customers."
Kolb cautions vendors approaching this market to consider the business implications and bottom line benefits offered to customers. "As is already commonly known, corporates are becoming more critical and are demanding better returns on their IT investments, and as a result our research is now trying to uncover what this actually means in measurement terms."
He says there may also be a trend of some smaller vendors moving their CRM services in-house, the aim being to reduce their customers` total costs of ownership and to gain a share of services` revenues.
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