Matt Haughey: Receipt, please

"And yet, in 2003, I have to save a piece of paper for five years if I ever want my washer fixed under the purchased warranty. It's as if all parties have agreed that despite our level of data sophistication, we'll instead act as if it's 75 years ago and everything that matters ends up in a big paper ledger somewhere, and unless it's in the big paper book, it never happened. Dumb, isn't it?"

That disconnect between the sophisticated internal systems of vendors and retailers and the crap they ask their customers to go through shows that most CRM implementations were in fact Customer Ready (to be) Milked projects. Why don't you open up your big datastores and have them do something useful for me for a change?