United Kingdom

The UK ranking of sections is similar to the others (this shows a similar focus, although the actual scores are generally below the European average), apart from IT, Process and the Customer Experience. The UK focuses heavily on IT, and has the highest ranking for IT, but has the worst score for defining Processes. It has poor scores for both Analysis and Planning (which customers do we want to manage and how?) and Customer Management Activity, and the worst score for Proposition (how should we manage customers?)! Perhaps this is one of the reasons why IT CRM systems have such a poor success record in the UK. It is almost as though UK companies want to buy success through IT, without going through the pain of developing the business model or addressing critical success factors. The Customer Experience score is excellent, and shows that although UK companies may not be strong yet in managing customers, they are learning quickly about what customers want and how they want to be managed. The question is, will UK companies be able to facilitate the step-change required to catch up with some of their global competitors?

The poor score in Analysis and Planning is important. Understanding which customers you want to manage, and what aspects of acquisition, retention and development need improving, is fundamental to good customer management practice. Why are UK companies lagging behind other European countries here? We believe it might be an educational or cultural issue, with too few professional marketers with 'direct' or 'database' marketing experience in place in senior roles in UK companies compared with their European peers, despite there being many such people at more junior levels. Poor scores in Proposition and Process are revealing. Although these factors correlate less strongly with business performance, low scores here do tend to show that a company is unclear about how to manage customers and is probably busy cutting costs, or blindly following (equally poor) competitors with 'me-too' type offers. Measurement also is rather weak, and this is an important area linked closely with business performance.