Winning Customer Loyalty with AIMS
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Oct 14, 2004 - New Straits Times

Loyalty programmes have become an importantant tool for organisations to stay in touch with their customers and generate big potantial for future sales. However, maintaining such programmes is fairly complex that a high degree of automation would be needed.

This has created a niche area within the information and communications technology (ICT) market and a local company, Advance Information Marketing Sdn Bhd (AIM), intends to capitalise on the growing opportunity. For this purpose, the company has developed its own enterprise marketing management (EMM) tool, named AIMS (Advanced Information Markteting Solution)

"We have a broad range of target markets, and this covers vertical markets such as tele-communications, banking and finance, manufacturing and retail such as hypermarket scenarios," says Nyang Koon Seng, chief executive officer of AIM.
He explains that to address the market more effectively, AIM has set up Customer Loyalty Solutions Sdn Bhd and since the inception 16 months ago. the company has hit a turnover of RM7 million.

"We've had a fantastic start to our commercial ventures, and we hope to hit a turnover of more than RM10 million by 2005," he says.

Presently, AIM has 12 clients, including banks and finance instutions, and FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) clients such as F&N and Salem.

"With our current progress, we want to position this company in the top 10 and hope to expect double-digit growth figures in the next two year," says Nyang.

AIM's chief technology officer Palani Selvam Muruganandam explains that the company started out as division of a marketing consulting company, carrying out research and development (R&D) activities in EMM technology.

However, as more organisations began to leverage EMM to facilitate effective and efficient use of marketing resources, a seperate entity was formed to focus solely on the development of EMM technology.

"Powered by a suite of applications, AIM's EMM solutions give marketers the tools to develop deeper customer understanding while delivering more personal and compelling marketing through the customer lifecycle," he says.

Palani explains that AIMS is a solution based on the concept of a shared platform and seamless deployment that enables utilisation by an unlimited number of merchants and service providers.

He says AIMS' key distinctions include an application framework that enables a multitude of organisations to adopt and offer solutions at lower costs and on demand to their customers.

AIM' shared-unified database which comprises customer database, products, customer database, products, demographics, trends and bevioural attributes are accessible as a whole or on a modular basis to organisations. It also provides scalability and compatibility with its potential clients' existing back-end systems and database.

"The ability to generate accurate statistics and data-mining capabilities accross a wide range of industries and customer segments will help clients to leverage these solutions to offer better co-branding loyalty programmes to their customers." Palani says.