The customer knowledge journey
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David Roscoe is Managing Director of Prophit Share, an established customer knowledge and CRM analytics company. He has over twenty years experience in financial services and is a regular speaker at industry conferences, both in the UK and around the world. He is regarded as one of the most innovative figures in his field developing a unique customer-focused culture within the marketplace.
Abstract Customer relationship management (CRM) is the hot topic for many organisations at the moment. this could produce significant returns on investment and deliver the objective of a one-to-one relationship with customers, but it also puts a greater onus on companies to actually deliver their ‘brand promise’. For CRM to be sustainable it has to embed the learning from its relationships with customers within a clearly defined customer strategy and deliver tactics that fulfil that common goal of true CRM. Keywords Customer relationship management (CRM), CRM analytics, customer knowledge, knowledge management, database, segmentation, brand promise, marketing, customer strategy
INTRODUCTION To paraphrase Lord Lever: ‘Only 50 per cent of my customers are profitable. I just don’t know which 50 per cent’. There are very few businesses, even today, that can estimate profitability at a customer level. There is also a lack of control of customer information which would enable them to assess accurately how much an individual customer is contributing by way of profit. Subsequently, companies fail to create an informed customer management strategy. In other words they really do not know how their customers feel about them, what their customers’ needs are on an individual basis and why a customer chooses their brand rather than that of someone else. David Roscoe Prophit Share Ltd, Cheltenham House, Clarence Street, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL50 3JR, UK
CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Tel: +44 (0)1242 772 222; fax: +44 (0)1242 772 223; E-mail: [email protected]
A survey of 100 major companies in 1999 found:
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Journal of Financial Services Marketing
Vol. 5, 4, 314–318
— only 8 per cent were capable of analysing their own customers — 89 per cent said customer information was important to their success — 43 per cent could not identify the principal causes of churn — only 5 per cent have an integrated customer database — the greatest source of customer information was personal contact (tacit knowledge). Certainly the area of tacit knowledge is a major untapped source of customer knowledge and it is free. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge about customers that is hidden in customer-facing staff, such as the telesales or sales force; they do not have the ability or infrastructure to release that knowledge and store it for the benefit of customers and the company. Collecting customer knowledge by whatever means needs to fulfil overriding business objectives, otherwise it is a pointless and costly exercise. Customer
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363-0539 (2001)
The customer knowledge journey
knowledge management should alway
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