Who can afford a bad investment, especially in a software system that you're going to use (or should I say "be stuck with") for years to come? ROI may be the popular term of the day, but decisions can be critical to the company's future beyond just the bottom line.

If there is a hotter term than ROI in the business world today it's CRM: customer resource management. Foremost Insurance, a specialty carrier for mobile homes, motor homes, travel trailers, and other recreational equipment, needed an improved CRM system to support its independent agent force. The company got that-along with a pretty fair ROI-when it invested in Oncontact Software's Client Management Software (CMS).

Just about anything would have been an improvement over the way Foremost kept in touch with its agents; voice mail and the U.S. Postal Service were the only tools it had. The company generated monthly premium reports for its agents that were 500 to 1,000 pages long, according to Kammi McDermott, director of agency sales. Sending these reports was costly and time consuming, but the single-page reports on each account in the territory were the only tools the agents had to work with. Without them it was impossible to examine individual territories with home-office personnel.