
Return on investment (ROI), in very simple terms, can be said to be a measure of cost to gain. So what's the path to a positive ROI on CRM systems? It's reducing your costs by increasing your efficiencies, increasing your profitability by improving your productivity, both of which lead to enhancing your customers' satisfaction.
So how do you determine the costs or the gains in implementing a CRM system? There are hard and soft costs as well as hard and soft gains. I suggest that while the hard costs and gains are the easiest to calculate, it's the soft costs or gains that make the difference in evaluating the returns on the implementation of a CRM system.