Practical Issues of Implementing CLV

I think from a practical standpoint, the most prevalent issue of implementing a CLV system is that it requires significant upfront investment to get the system in place. Often older systems are outdated, have incomplete information and are not layed out in a format that is easily accessed, exportable or translated to the new system. Cleaning the data in order to ready it for a move can be very costly and time consuming.

At work, we recently went through a CLV switch which was incredibly painful. While in theory, the amount of information that we were trying to condense into single records for each consumer we had in our system what a great idea, they actual switch was riddled with many obstacles. The first problem is that the database system that we were sold was not meant for destination marketing companies but rather for sales companies. We had to bend the system to do things it wasn't built for. In our case, the switch took 6 months and actually caused us to encounter every marketer's worst nightmare, we started to drop orders and conversions because the interface between our website and the database system was complicated that every Visitor Guide order or enewsletter sign up was not going into the system for fulfillment. So, we had numerous people calling, saying they had ordered a guide, but had not yet received it and I had no record of it in the system. AHHH!!! We made the conversion that we worked so hard to get and then weren't fulfilling it. To make matters worse, the vendor didn't believe we had a problem. The root of the problem was that the CLV system was so complicated on the back end to get it to work that the simple "catch and throw" action (receive a visitor guide order, put it in the mail) that should be easily accomplished was not. Eventually, we retrieved all of our old data and switched back to our older system which was reliable.

One of the other problems with CLV is that now that you have collected all of this great information, what do you do with it. To tailor individual communications and come up with the content and time to market on a mass customization level also takes significant levels of investment. With a marketing staff of 2, we find it very difficult to keep all of the other balls in the air while really utilizing our database to its full potential. I guess this is one of those times where there is always room for improvement. With a new agency and database solution this year, we are hoping to make significant strides in this area.