The most recent poll of IT bosses from the world’s biggest retailers shows that IT departments aren’t just talking about their customers, they are preparing to invest in them too.

The most recent poll of IT bosses from the world’s biggest retailers shows that IT departments aren’t just talking about their customers, they are preparing to invest in them too.

Last week I wrote about how much of the technology on show at this year’s National Retail Federation convention in New York had been customer-focused innovation.

The executive overview of the latest Global Retail CIO survey backs this up, highlighting that nearly half those questioned are planning to implement multi-channel customer relationship management systems (CRM) in the next three years, and 38% are looking at customer loyalty systems.

The research, which is conducted by Martec International and sponsored by IBM and Aldata, collected the views of more than 100 CIOs and IT directors, whose businesses account for 8% of the total retail market in the Americas and Europe. The direction they are taking their IT spend is a path that we should expect smaller retailers to eventually follow.

This new focus on multi-channel CRM is not surprising given the growing importance of online and multichannel retail within retailers’ sales mixes. If you are to make decisions about what your customers want you must first work out who they are.

But only two or three years back CRM was a dirty term in the industry with retailers who had invested previously not getting the return on investment they had hoped for or been promised.

Partly this was down to the vendor community, but partly it was down to retailers not understanding how to create value from the insight such systems can generate when properly used. This is a situation which has quickly changed as innovation backed by loyalty data has given the lucky few huge competitive advantage when trying to engage customers at the group and individual level.

A couple of days ago I overheard Retail Week’s distinctly non-technical editor Tim Danaher talking extremely positively about CRM and loyalty systems after having been on a visit to see how one retailer is turning its customer data into insight that’s used across the business. He won’t know or care about which CRM system is being used, the data cleansing that’s required or how the data warehouse underlying the system has been built.

And there is no reason why he should. All that matters is he could see the huge potential of having information at your fingertips to make great business decisions.

If you are planning to spend a significant amount of your IT development budget on CRM and loyalty systems this year, then you should make sure that everybody in your business can see the potential from early on in the implementation too.