How to turn customers into friends

CRM, or customer relationship marketing, promises a lot, using information often lying dormant in databases as the starting point for a two-way dialogue with consumers, generating sales and driving loyalty by getting to know what people want.<br><br> However, although many companies in Asia have collected large pools of customer information only a handful have found a way to use it to drive business. <br><br> For most marketers, customer relationship marketing is a nice idea but nothing more, frustrated by a number of barriers standing in their way: the difficulties in getting separate departments within a company working together and to a shared goal; coming to grips with digital channels that are increasingly playing an intrinsic part in CRM; and, perhaps most importantly, upgrading the quality of data management, with room for significant improvement in most markets in the region. If a CRM system works well in one market, regional differences in infrastructure mean that there is no guarantee it will work in another. <br><br> Nevertheless CRM is starting to take off in the region as more and more marketers implement schemes that help them get closer to consumers, making customer wants and needs come alive through true relationship marketing. With this in mind, Media has commissioned agencies to present examples from five sectors showing how marketers in each overcame the barriers they were facing to realise CRM's promise in Asia.