ALKHOBAR, 10 September — It was my birthday last week. I had been anticipating it for days. What I hadn’t been aware of was how many other people were anticipating it too. It seems that lots of companies that I do business with have been working on their customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the past year. Basically what CRM does is to capture information from all points of customer contact, refine it into customer knowledge and intelligence, and then make this available to people across the business whether they are delivering services, selling one-to-one, or developing product or service marketing strategies.

Used properly, CRM can help companies provide effective, efficient customer service. For years I have been advocating the implementation of such systems by businesses in the Kingdom, and I still encourage it. But the use of the data captured through CRM must have limits, and last week this was clearly demonstrated to me.

My education into “customer relationship mismanagement” started very early Wednesday morning, when I logged on to my e-mail for the first time that day. There were a whole bunch of weird messages in my primary mail from people I didn’t know. Upon investigation, these messages turned out to be birthday greetings from total strangers. The situation was a stronger wake up than a double espresso.

After analyzing the e-mails, I came to the conclusion that companies were making unauthorized use of personal information I’d been forced to provide to them. Take the example of Dubai’s Emirates Towers Hotel. They had easy access to my birth date because I was required to present my passport on check-in. The hotel sent me a confirmation of my reservation by e-mail. So through some warped idea of appropriate CRM, Emirates Towers staff entered my birth date and e-mail into a system that automatically sent me a birthday greeting on the appropriate date. It gave me the creeps. I have been wondering what other details they have about me in their database and what kind of security they are using to protect against malicious access to that information. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that they might be selling my personal information to other companies!

Some businesses got my birth date through information I’d been asked to give them in personal profiles. In every case I went back and changed the online profiles, making sure that the information was 100 percent wrong. In online profiles I used to always enter a false address and telephone number, and spell my name incorrectly, but no more. Now I have created and saved a completely false personal profile, complete with throw away e-mail, which I plan to use at all times everywhere.

As the day wore on my inbox filled with more and more birthday greetings from total strangers and I became angrier by the hour. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting e-mail from family and friends. But last week I had to waste my expensive Internet time downloading messages that I did not care to receive. Finally, in the afternoon I noticed the ultimate indignity. My sister had sent me an electronic birthday greeting from a company called “123 Greetings.” That company had captured my e-mail from my sister’s greeting card message and had put me on its mailing list to be sent regular advisories of upcoming holidays. If “123 Greetings” had put my sister on their mailing list, that might have been all right. After all, she was the one who used their service. She might have agreed to allow them to send her their marketing material. But I never consented to anything of the sort, and I am furious that they found it acceptable CRM to stuff my mailbox without my authorization.

I went to the “123 Greetings” website, looking for an e-card to send them; something that would state exactly where they could stuff their holiday club. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything appropriate. I plan to mail them this column as a suggestion that they develop a new line of greeting cards for just such a purpose. Now that will be true CRM.

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