Will the economic downturn postpone your multichannel efforts?

With the downturn appearing to be in full swing there's a danger that
some retail execs will postpone their multichannel aspirations.

Today I attended a presentation about strategies to retain core customers. This was followed by a statement that a CRM programme was not needed and that experience had shown that no x-sell or up-sell initiatives have ever been successful. This really grated with me and seemed counter-intuitive.

The customer is king to the multichannel retailer - how do you target your core customer when you don't know who they are and cannot connect with what they're buying? You resort to sampling and lesser accurate techniques whilst your competitors use their CRM and loyalty schemes to mine customer trends and buying patterns!

Surely in the current climate knowing your customer and what they are buying is key to retaining them. I would suggest the lack of success relating to x-sells, etc is more related to the lack of the ability to measure success.

I suspect the statement was more related to the state of budgets for such a CRM programme.

My view is that now more than ever is the time to find out who your customer is, how they are interacting with you and how you can serve them better.