In April 1998 Michael Cascade, then a relationship marketing manager at Orange, was brought in to the brand management department to help push forward relationship marketing (RM) initiatives. Today, his business card reads Head of Customer Relations Strategy and he focuses full-time on getting CRM on the Orange agenda. It was an odd journey , he reflects. What he initially accepted as a reasonable challenge, he quickly found a daunting task: there were no foundations upon which to build RM, let alone CRM, into the company s policies and practices. There was no access to data, no understanding of the value of our customers, and no front end systems to select segments or subsets of groups , he says. We didn t have access to a data warehouse and had only a manual way of using control and test groups.

It was time to start digging into the company s archives of information, into the company s pockets of project funding, and into the company s collective ability to undergo fundamental change.

The apparent lack of resource and willingness to accept a new business approach based on marketing rather than sales took its toll. The department suffered a two-year bout of high staff turnover, culminating in the departure of the Head of Brand Management. The constituent parts of the department, Customer Communications, Relationship Marketing, and Retention & Development, were relocated, the latter two being subsumed into customer services operations in order to create a team responsible for end-to-end customer management. With the...