Know Thy Customer
September 2, 2008 by admin
Filed under Applied Insight, Articles, September 2008
Nauman Shaikh tells you why it’s important to know your customer!
If there were 10 commandments issued for a corporation, Know Thy Customer would definitely have been the first commandment. While this century old adage always seems to be dominant in all marketing material, an organization that lives by this principle is not very easily built. In the pre-computing world, the responsibility of knowing the customer lied with the sales and service people who interacted with the customers. However, that tacit knowledge was not very easily recorded, stored, shared or exploited for increased revenue and improved customer loyalty. With the advent of computing that automates all aspects of an organization, it became a little easier to understand the customer for maximizing gains. This came to be known as Direct Marketing. Customer behavior was electronically recorded and then marketing promotions and campaigns exploited that knowledge for increased sales. Along came e-business and customers started interacting with organizations through a virtual world. This sales driven customer behavior monitoring now needed the service information as well in one place. Hence, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was born. Read more
