Abstract:
Customer insight underpins customer relationship management (CRM). Without a detailed understanding of customer profiles and behaviour, any CRM undertaking will be running blind. Conversely, no matter how sophisticated a company's ability to generate customer insight, it will deliver little value without the processes in place that exploit this understanding to build stronger customer relationships. This paper illustrates how to deploy customer insight throughout the organisation to increase customer value and to learn from customer interactions to generate further customer insight. This ‘closed-loop’ approach is the crucial step necessary to bring the analytical and operational components of CRM into harmony.This paper describes the types of techniques and technologies (such as campaign management) used to transform customer insight into customer value, and considers some of the pitfalls surrounding the use of these tools. The paper also outlines the best approach for integrating customer insight and customer interaction processes, including examples of best practice business and technical architecture solutions. Finally, it explains a ‘recipe for success’ for closed-loop CRM. This examines the key factors that organisations must consider most carefully when implementing the solution: customer targeting, response capture and performance measurement.Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing (2001) 10, 168–178; doi:10.1057/palgrave.jt.5740043