The failure rate for CRM or almost any other IT project involving development and/or extensive configuration falls within the same boundaries established by Barry Boehm et al decades ago. The range given in "Software Engineering Economics" is 50%-80%, depending on type of system and development.
He wrote a more recent paper on the fact that project cancellations are not project failures, more indicative of practical thinking (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/class/Fcomp145/media/docs/Boehm_Term_NE_Fail.pdf)
Overall, these rates have not changed significantly in 40 years. Maybe we can take these as established baselines and look instead at what causes these failures in a specific domain like CRM since they vary from one to another.
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