Let’s be frank, building customer loyalty and gaining share of wallet are strategic imperatives for all businesses. Most marketers should be very aware that research highlights that an increase in customer retention by only five per cent can lead to a significant uplift in profitability. Combined with the fact that acquiring a new customer is five to 10 times more costly than retaining an existing one, it is no surprise that many companies are desperately looking into retention strategies. The challenge lies in combining excellent retention activity while maintaining acquisition activity – fundamental for long term business survival.

To achieve this, the real concern is not how much data companies own or are able to obtain, but how to manage the data effectively to drive highly targeted and personal communications, at the right time, through the right channel. In fact these issues and questions were the subject of a recent event we co-hosted with Google.  
Our experience is that many companies had thought they had addressed this issue when they implemented customer relationship management (CRM) programmes. Unfortunately some years later, many organisations are not realising the returns they expected on this vast investment and are at risk of losing long term customers if ignored.

This reason for this is simply that companies viewed CRM as a technology solution, not as a fundamental change in how they manage and use customer data. The consequence means they are not focused on developing the capabilities required to leverage CRM technology effectively to drive customer loyalty, profitability and acquisition.

The answer to this challenge lies in a new approach in managing customer data and is called, customer information management (CIM). I honestly believe that companies will not meet their return on investment (ROI) objectives from CRM unless they use CIM as the basis for enabling the most fundamental of all CRM principles – "treating different customers differently".  

This approach can be utilised by organisations that have invested in either CRM technology or created a Single Customer View (SCV), as alone these developments are not enough to ensure loyalty is harnessed or created. CIM is the future for allowing businesses to manage customer data to drive profit through intelligent marketing insight.