A friend asked me a few weeks ago to share the most spectacular CRM disaster in my experience. The most interesting CRM lesson I learned (as in the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times"), was with a company who had grown from 50 to 500 people in less than 5 years; and from a handful to a thousand customers.

The mistake they made was not to have a single name - or identifier - for a customer across different systems. So the same customer appeared many times in their accounting system as XYZ001 and ABC002, with different company or division names and no consistency in spelling. Then in their operations system, used for helpdesk and technical support, the same customer was N000007, and A999000. And in the customer database, although there was slightly more consistency, there was no link to either of the other systems.

So when they wanted to enable customers to log in to their website and check current invoices outstanding or the status of helpdesk enquiries or simply to update their contact details, there was a major problem. They had to embark on a major data cleansing and linking exercise that took several months and lots of money before they could even think about implementing a CRM system.

The lesson I learned was not only to build for the long-term from the word go, but also that there are obstacles to seamlessly integrated systems across the extended enterprise. Other obstacles I have come across in my experience include not only data integrity and data integration issues, but also security constraints and the lack of pervasive connectivity. For example, your partners might not be willing to let your systems talk to their systems and not all your customers communicate with you using the Internet as a channel.