Briefs

An infusion of new customer metrics brings the moribund marketing discipline back to life

By Carol Krol, October 8, 2007 It used to be that CRM was the favorite whipping boy of marketers. Back in the day, multimillion-dollar CRM systems were installed by corporations and then followed a high failure rate of many implementations, thus giving the process a black eye and creating a backlash among marketers. Talk about your dirty acronyms.

However, due to the rise in availability and sophistication of customer analytics tools and the ability to use those tools in conjunction with CRM, direct marketers' can get closer to the holy grail of reaching customers with relevant, targeted marketing messages.

Customer analytics is an area that is growing rapidly due to enhanced usability and better data integration capabilities, so it now plays a pivotal role in the b-to-b world.

According to Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, co-authors of "Competing on Analytics" (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), companies in a variety of industries are enhancing CRM with predictive analytics and are enjoying market-leading growth and performance as a result.

Total annual revenues for CRM providers are expected to be $8.5 billion this year, and by 2010, organizations will spend $11 billion annually on CRM solutions, according to Forrester.

Gartner Group forecast CRM spending this year will exceed $7.4 billion, a 14% increase from 2006, and predicted CRM software spending will grow to more than $11.4 billion by 2011.

CRM and analytics combined make possible insight into customer behavior that in turn enables smarter marketing.

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