Last week for my visit to Online Market World I tried to book a car, choosing my favorite rental agency (one of the major players). I was dismayed to learn that my club membership number was no longer recognized. I suppose it had been two years since my last rental in the States–most of my travel for the past two years has been in Europe, where I use a different agency.

Now, I’ve had that membership number since 1993, and it’s recorded in all my travel profiles (Orbitz, Travelocity, etc.). Along with my number, the car company maintains all my personal preferences, my address, my credit card number–everything that makes it convenient for me to use them over another agency, even if they’re not the cheapest.

That’s the point of a loyalty program; in a sense it’s a compact between two parties. The customer agrees to submit their personal information to the vendor, and the vendor in turn provides additional services to that customer. Any marketing and sales professional will tell you that loyalty programs and customer relationship management are key to retaining customers and increasing market share.

So why was my customer number and personal profile deleted? The message is clear; they must not value me as a customer.  I should go somewhere else.

Of course it’s not that simple. I do consulting is an area where marketing meets IT, so I can guess what really happened. I know that if the sales or marketing manager were questioned about the need for obsoleting such data, they would say “Don’t ever do it! Disk space is cheap, and our customers, even occasional customers, are important to us.”

But some well-meaning person in IT decided that they needed to “clean out” old records from their customer care system, so they instituted a policy of cleaning out idle records every two years. It may even reduce the task of backing up data, and increase the speed of lookups within their online systems. There was probably a good reason for it.

The real question is, who should be making these decisions about customer relationship data? The answer is that Sales and Marketing should work with IT not just to define marketing programs and get them online, but to think about the ongoing maintenance and IT policies, and how they might affect the company’s bottom line.

Loyalty programs shouldn’t have the effect, as this one did, of disenfranchising customers and turning them away if they haven’t made a purchase in a while. That’s like saying “if you don’t do regular business with us then we don’t want your business.” That’s a Disloyalty program!

Sales and marketing program managers aren’t IT specialists; IT professionals aren’t marketers. That’s why any such sales and marketing program needs open communication between the two groups, especially a discussion of the ramifications of IT policies and procedures and how they will effect the customer experience.

It may come down to hiring a specialist who has experience brokering between IT and marketing–an information architecture or a user experience professional who can “see around corners” and detect issues and the gaps between marketing’s program plan and IT’s subsequent deployment. The investment in good advice is small when compared to the alternative : losing customers.