Ensure that an enterprise plan for management and use of customer information is in place. All key stakeholders, with representation from marketing, sales, customer service, finance, operations and IT as a minimum, must feed the overall management plan from an enterprise view.

Organizations spend vast sums of money on managing and using customer information, and the customer database is often quoted as a major asset of the business. As such, it should be covered by a comprehensive plan that does this asset justice. Only one organization in the US study felt it had an enterprise customer information plan in place and actively being used. Only 4 per cent of companies in the global assessment base felt they had such a plan in place. In many cases, departmental plans exist (that is, in marketing or in CRM teams), but organizations find it very difficult to take an enterprise view of their data assets. Given the inherent value of customer data, this is something that organizations must address.

According to Scott Nelson from Gartner Group, one of the reasons CRM projects fail is because there is no plan: