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By editorial@silicon.com, 25 December 2002 00:05

COMMENT Santa has a real problem with customer churn. Every year, millions of them drift away as they lose their belief in Santa's operation. New customers are acquired to make up for the loss but as the CRM sales person said: "Imagine how your marketshare could be boosted if you could hang on to your customers for life." After citing numerous examples of helping telecoms companies with similar customer churn issues, the sales person convinced Santa to go for it. Santa has taken the sales person's advice and is now planning to kick off his new CRM programme with a targeted campaign to reassure all eight-year-olds he will continue to be there for them. In a subsequent campaign, Santa is planning a range of incentives to encourage lost customers to "come back". Consultants reviewed Santa's business and determined that his core competence was goods distribution. They also reviewed the market and identified an opportunity not to be missed. Santa will now be helping Tesco.com deliver last minute orders to customers who were not quick enough to secure a pre-Christmas delivery slot through the normal Tesco van distribution operation. There was panic last week as Santa's state-of-the-art automated warehouse system ground to a halt. The wireless devices used by the picking elves to find the goods on the shelves and scan them onto the load started behaving unpredictably. The problem turned out to be due to interference with the warehouse wireless LAN as a result of the quality control elves testing a container load of Bluetooth enabled mobile phones. DHL declined to bid for Santa's delivery business as gaining access to people's homes in the middle of the night without waking them up was too much of a challenge. They thought of sub-contracting the job to the Federation of Professional Burglars but decided this might not be good for their image if details of the deal leaked out. The whole argument came full circle anyway when DHL's lawyers insisted on householders being woken up to sign for the goods received. Without this, it was felt that the company would be exposed to bogus claims of gifts not being delivered. After being assured by the vendor that his web infrastructure was secure, and religiously applying updates and patches as they became available, Santa was not happy when hackers broke in and accessed the Christmas lists of high profile senior executives from the IT industry... Any ideas as to what was on those lists? If you want to respond to this article post a Reader Comment below, or email editorial@silicon.com to let us know what you'd like to see Dale cover in future 'What if...' columns. **Dale Vile is service director at analyst house Quocirca. His c.v. boasts years at Nortel Networks, Bloor Research, SAP and Sybase, and his job now involves working with vendors and users wanting to tap the business benefits of technology. For more information see: http://www.quocirca.com