SUSTAINABILITY
AS LEGENDARY MANAGEMENT theorist Peter Drucker once remarked : “ The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer ”. Indeed , the art of creating new customers , as per the maxim , has been welldocumented by many business publications , but the challenge of keeping customers is not always given quite as much mainstream attention .
Research from Econsultancy a few years ago demonstrated that seven out of 10 businesses reckon it easier to retain a customer than acquire one . If this is the case , why is more attention is not devoted to this topic ?
In recent years , customer relationship marketing ( CRM ) has emerged as a key means by which businesses can tap into their existing customer base to generate easy profit . To find out a bit more about the potential benefits of CRM , Business Chief spoke to James Ray , CEO of Armadillo CRM , a big player in the space which underwent a management buyout earlier this year .
Ray was part of the three-man team responsible for the buy-out , and has been with the company since 1996 , previously serving as Armadillo ’ s Client Services Director ,
Armadillo CEO James Ray
Chairman and MD prior to the buyout . We asked him exactly how CRM works . “ Data is our raw material ,” Ray explains . “ In our case our clients tend to be businessto-consumer ( B2C ) brands so we are usually working with consumer data , purchases , clicks , logins , browsing and so on . We mine the data for insights – analysing patterns , trends and signals . That insight feeds a strategy to engage , influence or change the customer ’ s behavior in line with our client ’ s objectives – usually with KPIs and a business case attached . Then we bring that strategy to life with
the right mix of data , creativity and technology to change the customer
52 April 2018