In-house CRM may not be as good as it looks

Your cover story (last week) concludes that many brands decide to keep CRM programmes in-house. But in doing so they could be missing out on the potential rewards of wider industry expertise offered by specialist data suppliers.

Effective CRM is driven by knowledge from data. Quite often, internal solutions are not optimised. For example, we’ve experienced internal systems where back-end databases have to support many business functions beyond marketing, such as finance and HR, leaving the marketers with a solution that lacks the essential characteristic of agility.

Sticking in-house is a bit like only eating one cuisine without knowing that more tasty options exist.

Alan Thorpe
Commercial and operations director
G2 Data Dynamics

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