Understanding Customer Relationships

August, 2004

We’ve all heard it a thousand times: It’s much more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer. And, we’ve heard that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of your client base—those with whom you enjoy long-term and profitable relationships. I think it’s safe to call these marketing ’truths’.

Well, if that’s the case, we wonder why so often we see companies, large and small, who don’t have a handle on their customer relationships. And, if you don’t understand the extent of a client relationship, there’s absolutely no way that you can maximize that relationship. For example, we’ve seen financial institutions (even those with sophisticated and costly marketing databases) who cannot tell you that Customer X who holds one of their credit cards also just refinanced their home. And, by the way, X has had a checking account with the bank since they graduated. Now, if that bank had known the full extent of the relationship, it could have used this knowledge to creatively bundle services and present a better offer. If the bank had only done this proactively, Customer X may not have decided to transfer their credit card balance to a competitor. Unfortunately, Customer X just become a lot less profitable.

RRW Consulting offers expertise and knowledge of the available resources that help link customers (and prospects) together, thus finding those sometimes elusive customer relationships. We have real-world experience in helping our clients implement ongoing data management processes that allow them to identify formerly unknown relationships within their customer data. Whether it’s consumer or business data, or even a combination of both, we can help you through our knowledge of data cleansing and integration tools. Then, we can take the next step and help you develop strategies to maximize the customer knowledge and create customer loyalty. This inevitably results in increased profits and overall increased customer satisfaction.

Let us know if you’d like a no-charge copy of our Data Management White Paper featuring market leading data integration practices as well as lessons we learned and pitfalls to avoid. We’ll send you the White Paper immediately.