Don Peppers

'The CRM revolution is sweeping the whole world,' he says. 'Our mission is to help management handle the great deal of complexity in processes and augmentation of structure that is required to align a business strategy with its customers.'

It is the kind of approach to customers that has captured the imagination of major corporations around the world, and Don Peppers believes the Middle East is now ripe for this kind of transformation.

'Of course, it varies very much around the region. Places like Dubai have already benefited a lot from CRM. But there are sectors like financial services, petroleum and chemicals, and particularly the e-government programs to connect electronically with citizens, where we would like to get involved.

'Our experience in CRM is also relevant to other industries such as real estate and property management, the automotive sector, IT and high-tech firms and retail. We are independent of the technology involved, although we do work with IT companies such as Oracle and SAP. But it is not our role to sell a particular platform.

'We see the technology as part of the whole CRM process. Our role is to offer independent advice and we often see the victims of CRM overspending. We help companies appreciate and anticipate the complexity of the process changes required for effective CRM.'

Don Peppers has a CV littered with the names of major global corporations, and it is clear his type of knowledge transfer will be warmly received in certain parts of the Middle East. He is presently writing a book entitled 'Return on Customer'.

The idea is that you should value a company by assessing the total value of the customer base and the value you can create from it. This is analogous to Warren Buffet's discounted cash flow model of growth stock valuation. But the concept of a value matrix for CRM is new, and shows just how far CRM has come.

Like most top management gurus from the US - and he is regularly listed among the world's top business thinkers - much of what Don Peppers says is commonsense. But his clarity of expression and the ability to apply solutions to particular problems and deliver results is impressive, as many major companies will testify.

Any organization considering extensive investment in CRM would be well advised to call in his consultants for a fresh appraisal of management systems. Otherwise expensive technology may not deliver the desired results, and perhaps it often takes an outside expert to see problems inside an organization clearly.