Great VRM article in the Financial Times by Alan Mitchell. An excerpt.
"When the UK market research company CCB FastMap asked consumers which method they most wanted companies to use when communicating with them – e-mail, phone, letter and so on – 63 per cent ticked the box that said “Not at all”.
Even where consumers have an existing relationship with a company, 23 per cent prefer not to have marketing communications from it. The rate rises above 50 per cent for some large utilities and banks.
Consumers are also increasingly unwilling to divulge data. The same research found that 86 per cent of consumers routinely tick the third party opt-out box when providing personal information. “People have become less happy about revealing information and especially allowing third parties to share it,” says David Cole, managing director of CCB FastMap.
This was not what customer relationship management was supposed to deliver when it was first touted in the early 1990s. The more data companies could gather about their customers, it was argued, the deeper the insights they would generate. This would lead to longer, more profitable relationships.
Instead, many companies have found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, most organisations’ transactions with their customers are too limited for them to get an accurate picture of their motivations and any data they gather quickly goes out of date. On the other hand, subsequent attempts to fill these holes by gathering more data simply intensify concerns over intrusion.
A research project in vendor relationship management at Harvard University Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has suggested a way through the impasse. The core idea of vendor relationship management (VRM) is simple: the more empowered individuals are when it comes to managing and using personal data – including the ability to manage their relationships with vendors – the greater the benefits to both sides."
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