JT on EDM

An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes:

Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can to make sure their existing customers stay with them and keep spending

I agree that spending has to focus on customer retention and development given how hard customers will be to find and that means focusing on customer treatment decisions so that you optimize the value of your existing customers.Using EDM to retain and develop customers by making more precise, consistent and agile customer treatment decisions is going to be critical. As the article went on to say

concentrate on building agility and capability into … organisations, emphasising(sic) an agile approach to emerging business needs which will complement their work on cost and efficiency

Empowering the business to take control of critical decisions not only reduces IT costs it also improves agility by allowing the business to control change and by reducing the IT impedance between a business change and a systems change. Back in February I wrote a series of posts on using EDM to thrive in a recession so I will leave it at that – read the series if you want more.