Earlier this year, I traveled to Boston and checked into the Westin hotel. After the clerk accessed my file online, he told me extra chocolates would be waiting on my pillow just as I had requested at the Phoenix Westin the previous month. I think I'll go back to the Westin, just as I'll stay with any service supplier that takes care of my personal needs. That's the value of good data mining.

The goal of one-to-one marketing is to grow customers by delivering tailored products and services that will create unbreakable, lifetime relationships. Yet while a single view of each customer is regarded as a critical business need today, only 2% of firms have that capability today, according to a June 1999 Forrester Research report.

A new breed of applications, dubbed eRM, or "eRelationship management," are coming to market to help companies better do this. Forrester predicts that eRM apps will obsolete customer relationship management (CRM) apps by 2002.

Want to know how well your company is using its existing database? Go through the following check list:

• Does your company know the current and future profitability of every unique customer? Good eRM apps can segment customers by profitability level and provide differentiated product services.
• Does your company know enough about its customers from past campaigns so that it is contacting them how they want to be contacted, when they want to be contacted, and with the right value proposition?
• Does your company increase customer profitability by allocating rewards for its best customers?
• Does your company count unique visitors, segment customers based on their online behavior, understand how online behavior drives sales and identify opportunities to grow online sales?
• Does your company combine the transaction data from financial and sales systems to quickly analyze and report an accurate, up-to-date view of a company's sales status?
• Does your company report regularly on sales commitments and opportunities in the pipeline? An accurate report on pre-sales data helps the sales team identify where their biggest opportunities lie, and forecast if they are going to make the quarter.
• Does your company capture and analyze high levels of details on campaigns, measured against control and test groups, automatically calculate ROI objectives, and seamlessly recalibrate campaigns based on the predictive indicators that led to the highest yielding results?
• Does your company analyze log files from the site and/or call centers to find out how customers tailor their array of products, in order to determine what new product features, options and combinations to build in the future?
  

How did you do? If you had to answer "No" to more than a few of these questions then your company is probably squandering opportunities for greater profitability. Customer care is only as good as a company's ability to capture, store, integrate and disseminate data.
 

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Source: 1999 ICONOCAST http://www.iconocast.com