The root cause of a disconnected customer experience is not building a single view of the customer. It’s important to do that before investing in marketing automation or CRM programmes. We know that customer retention is more profitable than customer acquisition. However, far more is spent on acquisition than retention.

Acquisition is the sexier sibling, but retention is the smarter one.

Retention needs focus.

For that, you need to invest in:

1. The customer view - what constitutes a single customer, the taxonomy and the profile descriptions.

2. How and where is it recorded - Is there a company wide SOP on correct data input sources? What tools do you give your employees to do this? This goes right down to frontline staff who interact with customers everyday. This is usually where it falls apart without SOPs and monitoring.

3. Integrating data sources - too many companies have legacy systems and third party solutions because they didn’t want to invest in building a solution that they own. But you need to ensure that your taxonomy is standard across all.

4. Mining the insights so that you provide a seamless customer experience.

5. Tracking revenue from acquisition vs retention and plan teams based on that.