How Satisfied Are You With Your CRM Provider?

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There was a terrific Dilbert cartoon from 12/27/15 that does a great job at illustrating some of the strongest complaints I hear from arts managers about their interaction with customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and the providers who manage them.

{Dilbert and a salesman from his company are in a conference room}

Salesman: I need you to join me a sales call to tell my customer how easy it will be to switch to our software.
Adaptistration People 181Dilbert: It isn’t easy.
Salesman: This is a sales call. All you need to do is say everything will be easy.
Dilbert: What happens what the find out it isn’t easy?
Salesman: They won’t find out until after they pay us.
Dilbert: What will you do when they complain?
Salesman: I’ll tell your boss you mislead them.
Dilbert: Not if I warn him first!
Salesman: Too late. I already told him you’re a liar.

I posted the comic on the ArtsHacker Facebook page and solicited feedback on potential interest in one or more articles designed to help organizations avoid getting caught up in the sorts of predatory practices included in the cartoon. Responses have been positive so I thought I’d take a moment here and generate a bit more feedback in the form of a survey.

I’m very curious to know more about how you would rate your current CRM, so I put together a short-and-sweet survey to measure your general satisfaction rate. Moreover, I’m especially interested in hearing from box office managers, but I would be grateful to have anyone that deals with an institution’s CRM take a moment to weigh-in.

For the sake of clarity, if your CRM is bundled into another service such as ticketing or web hosting, please consider only the CRM component when responding.

Need help understanding the difference between CRM, Ticketing, and Web services? Then I’ve got just the thing for you.

This Survey has expired.

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

View all posts by Drew McManus | Website

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3 thoughts on “How Satisfied Are You With Your CRM Provider?”

  1. “If you agree to not fire me I will agree to not sue you with some bogus employee claim. My mere existence will make your empire seem larger and stockholders will get stuck with the bill for my paycheck.” Dilbert
    (page 80, Dismissed)

  2. For a performing arts organizations, is there any good reason in the age of streamlined communications, branding, and blah blah “we have to be more lean” blah, but in particular because virtually every performing arts organizations (and arts and culture organizations more generally) derives more than half of all income from contributions over ticket sales not to have an online system that gives equal weight to CRM and ticket service functionalities, or, at the least, allow them to live separate lives peacefully until they’re ready to unite? Fractured Atlas’s Artful.ly started to address this issue, but it remains, even after a few years of operation (and countless user-suggestions for improvement), narrow and ponderous. I’ve accidentally come across something called “Arts People” out of the west coast, but have no idea how it stacks up against other systems. There are systems that offer add-ons and “apps” and what-have-you but I don’t want an “app” for the thing I want my software to do; I just want it to do it!

    >Pantpantpant<

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