Customer loyalty software helps companies figure out how to keep their clients for the long term.

News Story by Mark Leon

AUGUST 11, 2003 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Customer satisfaction is good, but customer loyalty is even better. "A satisfied customer is one who sees you as meeting expectations," says John Samuels, a senior manager in the marketing department at CDW Corp., a Vernon Hills, Ill.-based direct marketer of more than 50,000 hardware and software products, with net sales of $4.3 billion. "A loyal customer, on the other hand, wants to do business with you again and will recommend you to others."

CRM packages may help measure satisfaction, but not all of them can be used to benchmark loyalty, and the link is tenuous. A good loyalty program, according to Bob Chatham, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., combines customer feedback and business information with sophisticated analytics to produce actionable results. This is why IT has to take the lead in loyalty.

"IT is just about the only department that can coordinate between business processes, external data-analytic vendors and the executives who can translate output into action," says Chatham.

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That's where IT closes the loop. Aberdeen's Watkins puts it this way: "With good customer loyalty software, IT can wire the voice of the customer back into the enterprise."