Insurers will increasingly outsource customer and prospect marketing databases in the next two years, according to recent research by The Database Group and Marketing UK.
The companies said that outsourcing databases is now seen by insurers as the key to customer understanding.
Of the sectors surveyed, insurance and banking will be seeing the highest growth in outsourcing over the next two years.
The increasing competition in this sector is leading to an ever more limited pool of defectors for companies to target, so it is essential that they gain a stronger understanding about which of their customers are
profitable and are likely to remain so.
Outsourcing becoming an increasingly attractive option for many businesses who want to access skilled personnel without the recruitment headache.
The Database Group's managing director Richard Lees said: "Insurers are now increasingly aware of the difficulty of translating powerful software into equally powerful bottom-line results. They have seen that making CRM work IS difficult, and that technology alone is not enough. There is an increasingly compelling need for organisations to discover effective methods
for identifying, understanding, measuring and developing the latent value of their current customers."
He concluded: "The role of expert service companies is extending, whether marketing database activity is being hosted externally or in-house. This is especially true for 'futures' work, analysing and modelling new product and market projections."
The research was conducted amongst the UK top 1000 companies in the banking, insurance, retail, pensions and utility sectors.
