OREANDA-NEWS. April 09, 2010. Only 2/3 of Russian audit and consulting companies use their corporate web-sites as element of CRM (customer relationship management). Only 13% use this option comprehensively. This is the result of FBK research Internet-solutions in audit and consulting companies: practice overview, development prospects dedicated to analysis of exploitation of corporate web-sites of major Russian audit and consulting groups.

As it was found out during interviewing major audit and consulting groups almost 60% of companies do not use the web-site to sell their services, 26% do not use such function of the web-site as collecting applications with request for services. “Degree of involvement of web-sites of audit and consulting companies in business processes is not high”, states Vladimir Svetashev, Deputy Director of PR Department of FBK. “Most probably this is associated with the fact that solutions suggested by programmers do not comply with needs of consultants or they are complicated in terms of implementation”.

Only in terms of informational interaction audit and consulting groups use corporate web-sites actively (about 80% of the interviewed, while over 30% use more than one way). According to FBK experts “the matter is that using web-site as informational channel is an old and familiar way which, actually, was the beginning of construction of web-sites”.

Authors of research emphasize that “perspective of web-solutions sector for audit and consulting groups is very good”, western experience proves it. In the previous year, according to forecast estimates, the EU countries increased their IT expenses by 49,5%. At the same time, consulting companies are in the forth position in terms of amount of investments (behind financial companies, producers of consumer goods and producers of electronics).

In Russia, according to estimates of FBK experts, upgrading web-sites is already a primary need for over 15% of web-sites of major audit and consulting companies. The rest of over 80% of companies will face this problem in 1 to 3 years.