Knoa, a vendor of "experience and performance management software," has 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," the company says, adding that survey results 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," says 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 majority of the survey respondents, 65 percent, said end-users within their organizations complain about the usability and response time of their CRM system. And 60 percent of respondents expressed "concern" that a lack of adoption and use 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. Thirty percent of survey respondents said they use help desk logs to measure user experience.

The research, Knoa officials say, "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."

While 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, 55 percent of the same respondents reported that the users of their CRM systems complain about usability and response time, and 67 percent of those respondents were concerned that a lack of adoption and use of CRM systems causes the information to be inaccurate, or unrealistic.

The end-user experience survey was executed by ReachForce, a marketing data services company based in Austin, Texas.

In August, Knoa announced that Shred-it, an on-site document destruction company, selected Knoa Experience and Performance Manager to improve end-user performance related to its use of the SAP (News - Alert) Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application.

Shred-it is implementing SAP CRM to manage all customer-facing interactions, including contract administration, service orders, invoicing and customer support services.

Dan Snider, vice president, Business Solutions, Shred-it, said he "had concerns" that the IT team would not have sufficient visibility into the real end-user experience with the SAP CRM application and the issues individual employees were encountering.

"The 'go-live' implementation of products such as SAP CRM can require a very intensive, hands-on end-user support practice," said Snider. "In those early critical weeks, everyone using SAP CRM should be in the line-of-sight of a support person."

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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