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From Alan Joen, regional Director, CRM, Touchstone

Why CRM is an essential part of the marketing mix

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are being implemented in ways that almost guarantee they will not deliver on expectations.

Most CRM projects are primarily sales force automation, which wire up sales and customer services departments but overlook the marketing team. This only scratches the surface of what CRM is really all about.

With the marketing department cut out of the loop, the best they can do is produce broad campaigns based on limited customer intelligence. The result is a disappointing ROI from marketing spend, and a CRM project that management and investors perceive to have failed.

The irony of all this is that the technology itself is usually blamed for CRM project failures. But a good workman should never blame his tools - he should look instead to see that they have been applied correctly. In the case of CRM systems, they should never be deployed in part, but activated across all three departments of marketing, sales, and customer services.

CRM is not just about doing things better through automation, but doing better things. Applying CRM systems holistically has the effect of turning isolated pools of customer information into something of practical value to the business. This is surely what business automation and CRM is all about.

Archived views
Ronel Schoeman, Databases for retail uplift
Richard Roche, The times are a changing
Jeremy Saul, Holistic
Richard McCann, Friday's of Piccadilly
David Harrison, WSPS
Russell Loarridge, Firstwave Technologies
Alan Joen, Touchstone
John Whittingdale MP

You can contribute on any subject but you may like to add to debates that DM Business will be featuring throughout 2005.

Some topics that we think will be stimulating in 2005 are as follows:

Consumers who love direct marketing are the unspoken majority. Discuss in relation to any channel of communication.
To focus on ROI is to undervalue DM in order to satisfy simplistic FDs: Discuss.
Call centres in India will inevitably lead to a better deal for the consumer: Discuss.
The direct mail industry should pay no more than lip service to environmental issues. Discuss
The corporate consumer needs about as much protection from cold calls as a successful lawyer needs government grants. Discuss.
Data quality concerns are a hindrance to creative campaigning. Discuss.

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