Knoa, the leading provider of end-user experience and performance management software, today announced the findings of a survey conducted among IT executives and business stakeholders at Global 1000 companies. The goal of the survey was to gain insight into the impact of end-user experience on the results derived from CRM deployments.

Results of the survey clearly show that many enterprises find their end-users are having difficulties interacting with these systems. “CRM systems are one of the most challenging of enterprise software deployments because so much of the end-user behavior necessary to drive results is essentially voluntary,” said Lori Wizdo, vice president, marketing, for Knoa Software. “All too often, adoption and effective use of CRM functionality is hampered by a below par end-user experience with the application.”

A significant majority of the survey respondents, 65 percent, stated that end-users within their organizations complain about the usability and/or response time of their CRM system. And 60 percent of respondents expressed concerned that a lack of adoption and utilization of a CRM system causes the information to be inaccurate, or unrealistic.

The survey revealed that the stakeholders in CRM implementations recognize the importance of end-user experience, as only 16 percent are not attempting to measure end-user experience at all. But, the mechanisms in use to measure varied widely, with only 20 percent of survey respondents stating that they use an end-user monitoring technology.

Thirty percent of survey respondents said they use help desk logs to measure user experience. “While an analysis of help desk logs will yield some insight, the approach is blind to those end-users who do not ask for help, who have opted out of using the application, or find non-compliant workarounds,” said Wizdo.

Fifty-three percent of respondents use survey techniques to measure the user experience. “Surveys can emphasize the enterprise’s interest in end-user experience, but they can only capture limited data from the most engaged end-users who opt to respond,” said Wizdo. “Too often techniques like surveys and sampling result in misleading data sets that leads to results that are not in the best interest of the business.”

The research hinted that a certain degree of resignation creeps into the expectations of the stakeholders of CRM applications as the deployments mature through the application life cycle. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents, who have had their CRM system in place between two and five years, reported that it was running smoothly. However, 55 percent of those very same respondents reported that the users of their CRM systems complain about usability and/or response time (versus 65%) for all respondents; and 67 percent of those respondents were concerned that a lack of adoption and utilization of CRM systems causes the information to be inaccurate, or unrealistic (versus 60% for the group).

Seventy-eight percent of enterprises surveyed said they would find accurate, global end-user metrics on the response times, quality issues and usability that the CRM users are actually experiencing to be extremely valuable or very useful.

This research underscores the need for a comprehensive, systematic approach for measuring end-user experience and behavior. “Customer-facing sales and service organizations must continually enhance their operational performance to drive higher revenues and improve customer experience and satisfaction,” said Ms. Wizdo. “Knoa’s end-user experience and performance management solutions provide our customers with comprehensive, global end-user experience metrics to identify system issues and pinpoint targets for improving the performance of end-users on an ongoing basis, leading to higher levels of business impact from their CRM deployments.”

The end-user experience survey was executed by ReachForce, a marketing data services company based in Austin, Texas. All respondents were carefully screened to ensure their executive ownership responsibility for their CRM deployment. ReachForce's unique role-validation methodology was used to ensure the survey respondents were either the top business or top technology owner, with responsibility for the application.

About Knoa

Knoa® Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing corporate software applications to optimize business process execution. Knoa customers not only know if core enterprise applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but also, if application users are executing key processes effectively and efficiently - the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa was recently selected by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor”, for its capabilities in end-user experience and performance management and was listed as a Leader in the “Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End-user Experience Monitoring”. Knoa is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit www.knoa.com.

Note: Knoa is a registered trademark. All other company and product names contained herein are the marks of their respective holders.