Sales information systems in the UK financial services industry: an analysis of sophistication of use and perceived barriers to adoption

Abstract

This paper evaluates the use of sales information systems (SIS) in the UK financial services sector. The study is based on a quantitative survey of a sample of sales and marketing managers in banks, building societies and insurance companies. Seventy-two usable responses were received and our analysis reveals that the systems that have been adopted are being used to provide information for little more than mailing lists. Further, the aspirations for our respondents for further data capture and analysis are low—such that their overarching goals of improving customer retention, customer relationships, and customer acquisition are unlikely to be achieved. This mismatch between our respondent's data capture and their strategic goals is associated with the further finding that our respondents place more importance on technical barriers to implementing SIS—such as fragmented market and sales information, high cost of development and poor data quality—as compared to the lowered importance placed on organizational barriers. Importantly, the latter barriers have been recognized in the literature as the true barriers to achieving the strategic potential of marketing information. We argue that the future promise of sophisticated use of the capabilities of current SIS is thus likely to be compromised, due to the lack of awareness, amongst our respondents, of the criticality of organizational and strategic barriers.