State of Customer Relationship Management: The Canadian Report 2010
Highlights and Key Findings

In today's complex business environment, the extent to which manufacturing and services firms can effectively attract and retain profitable customers is a key determinant of their competitiveness. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a cross–functional strategic process utilized by firms to manage and develop their interactions with current and potential customers.

CRM is an innovation- and technology-driven process. To efficiently and effectively respond to rapid changes in customer demand, firms must have access to timely and accurate information regarding their current and potential customers. The integration of CRM technology^{Footnote I} into a greater CRM strategy provides firms with appropriate tools to respond to this challenge and the potential to enhance business operations throughout the sales cycle.

Across industry sectors, firms are prioritizing their investment in CRM — through both in-house and outsourcing investment — while integrating CRM with their commercialisation strategies to develop their revenue streams through new and existing markets. It is important that firms and policy makers have the ability to access and utilize strategic information and performance indicators enabling them to focus on CRM initiatives and strategies that deliver business benefits.

Industry Canada has partnered with Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters (CME), Canadian Services Coalition (CSC) an affiliate of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (CCC), Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA), and the Program for International Competitiveness at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management to review this valuable core business function. By collecting insights from industry, academia and international research organizations, and using economic analysis conducted by Industry Canada, this industry–academia–government partnership has produced a complete user / service profile of CRM in Canada, summarized here in this report. This unique analysis is intended to help Canadian business executives and policy makers enhance their understanding of current market trends, the latest key performance indicators (KPI), and best practices in CRM that improve domestic and international competitiveness across industries.

Key Findings

• CRM represented $116 billion of investment and employed 502,000 people in 2009 in Canada.^{Footnote II}
• CRM is a value–added core business function along with logistics and product design and development, and plays a vital role in the commercialisation of manufactured goods and related services.
• Targeted advertising, market research and skills development are among the leading CRM activities used by small and medium–sized enterprise (SME) manufacturers that successfully increased their exports of recent innovative products.
• The allocation between in–house and outsourced CRM investment by the different industry sectors has not changed significantly over the past several years.
• CRM outsourcing to service providers is forecasted to increase by 15 percent between 2009 and 2012, to reach $53.4 billion.
• The highest concentration^{Footnote III} of CRM service providers is in large metropolitan cities as these service providers are often established near the headquarters of their large corporate clients.
• Skills development within market research, marketing and promotion, and business development has been expanding beyond domestic and traditional CRM activities to include areas such as international market entry strategies and international trade practices and regulations.
• Although CRM technology can provide firms a competitive advantage in the marketplace, there is only limited adoption across sectors regardless of firm size.
• Best–in–Class (BiC)^{Footnote IV} firms are more likely to measure the performance of their customer relationship initiatives, utilize advanced lead management solutions and collaboration tools, and implement skills development to facilitate the achievement of business goals.

Footnotes

Footnote 1

CRM technology: CRM business processes operationalized by the structured exchange and management of information over networks using Internet architecture. These systems are also referred to as Internet business solutions. The network can be open (e.g. accessible to everyone through the World Wide Web) or closed (e.g. accessible only to employees or suppliers on a LAN or WAN ).

Return to footnote I referrer

Footnote 2

CRM investment includes manufacturing, wholesale, retail, logistics and transportation and finance and insurance industries. Employment includes CRM roles within those industries and the marketing services sector

Return to footnote II referrer

Footnote 3

Concentration is defined as the number of CRM service providers divided by the total number of all business establishments in a geographical location.

Return to footnote III referrer

Footnote 4

Best–in–Class firms are defined as the top 20 percent of North American firms benchmarked to improvement in five performance metrics: average deal size, average annual customer revenue, sales cycle time, time to quota, and sales administrative time.

Return to footnote IV referrer