The survey revealed that even though 52% of middle and senior marketers agreed their organisation understood the value of customer retention, only 33% were able to calculate the profitability of their customers.
As well as this, just 27% were able to predict attrition of their high-value customers.
Professor Merlin Stone, director of The Database Group, said: "The need for insight into what happens to customers in the period during which attrition is at risk has only just come onto the radar of most big companies in industries likely to suffer from high customer attrition, such as mobile telephony, internet service provision, utilities, credit cards and general insurance.
"In many cases, companies have only just got their basic data into a state where customer attrition can be properly analysed," Stone said.
The areas that companies have invested most in customer data management are in holding, collecting and managing data.
Professor Stone said that, on a positive note, progress with customer databases is being made compared to the "poor state" most customer databases were in a few years ago and he expects the numbers to improve over the next few years.
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