Costly customer relations
Last year's forecasts for slow growth in the Polish Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market appear to have come true.
"Growth is occurring, but it is very slow. More is said than done," says Zbigniew Suchocki from Nextira One, an international supplier of telecom services, which serves such clients as PKO BP, Pekao SA, Lukas Bank, and Raiffeisen.
CRM is an IT application which enhances a company's relationship with its customers. "We observe a slow growth of expenditure on CRM systems among our clients from the banking sector," says Suchocki, adding: "Banks are very much cost-oriented. They prefer to improve what they have rather than invest in new IT systems. Banks, contrary to telecom companies, rarely decide on revolutionary changes."
He also admits that Polish entrepreneurs are still skeptical towards such systems. "They keep repeating that CRM implementation is difficult, unprofitable and expensive."
A report by research company PMR predicts that in 2006, 300 new CRM implementations will be completed in companies employing more than 50 people. This is not an impressive number considering that there are about 17,800 such companies in the country. Many companies will implement the system on their own, which will limit the market even further.
"The small demand for advanced CRM systems in Poland has many causes. The bulk of companies do not need solutions enhancing customer service. Besides, the Polish market is very much cost-oriented, with less pressure from the customers' side for quality of service," said Wojciech Szajnert, the author of the PMR report.
CRM first appeared in Poland at the end of 1999. Now the software is most popular among firms operating on the B2B market. Some 90 percent of the companies that have CRM deal with internet trade. There is a strong connection between a company's size and CRM implementation. Only four percent of small firms decided to implement CRM systems. The most popular module is Contact Management, which supports contacts, sales, and time management.
