Retailers need to make progress with CRM

In the more than 20 years since Customer Relationship

Management (CRM) systems were being first discussed there has been little progress made in retailers gaining the sought after 360 degree longitudinal views of their customers.

This is the view of Peter Crayfourd, group head of customer experience lifestyle at Orange-France Telecom, who is due to present at the forthcoming 3rd Retail Bulletin Customer Loyalty Conference 2012 in London on June 13th and ahead of the event gave some insights into how retailers need to end the model of operating departmental silos of customer data.

“The customer information is in silos and we want to deliver a more pro-active approach of managing a differentiated customer experience through integrated data,” he says, adding that this is not necessarily caused by the increasingly multi-channel nature of retailers today but has been a problem for many years with “broken journeys” across single channels.

Crayfourd says customers instead need to be tracked over time at the ‘transaction level’ as only this provides the granular level of insight to evaluate which customers are happy when they have undertaken a certain interaction with a business whereas others might be unhappy with that same interaction. Crayfourd says retailers need to take a radical option of “taking their businesses and turning them on their heads”.

“It’s not about technology. It’s about the culture and emotions of the business to be able to affect positive change. Once the CEO has demonstrated the desire to change their organisation into a transversal proactive customer culture then the real work starts! As the nature of most human beings is to resist change – the process of taking an organisation from having disengaged employees to positive and passionate individuals is no insignificant task. It’s a cultural transformation initiative that’s needed,” he explains.