Merlin is a leading expert in customer management, including strategies and tactics for customer recruitment, retention, and development. His work focuses on improving customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty and trust, and also the customer research, data analysis, systems decisions and supplier selection and management needed to support improved management of customers.
He is Head of Research at The Customer Framework, which helps large organisations transform their business and marketing activities through a strategic approach to customer engagement and management, using techniques from classic CRM to social media. He is a leading contributor to the development of the customer management assessment methodologies for which The Customer Framework is best known.
He is a Senior Advisor at Clear Cell, provider of an innovative, proprietary Customer Insight Platform, which helps companies, organisations deliver sustainable growth by deploying outstanding customer insights to business decisions across multiple channels.
He is a Non-Executive Director at Aerice, experts in implementation in financial services and other industries, and specialists in delivery of secure risk management.
He is a Visiting Professor at De Montfort, Oxford Brookes and Portsmouth Universities and an Associate Lecturer in Economics at the Open University.
He is well known for his work on thought leadership and public relations - improving clients’ communications to the media and customers, including explaining complex propositions and conducting media interviews. This includes conference speaking (especially for client events) and thought leadership research, which focuses on clients’ customers and prospects, the issues they face, how they handle them, and where they need help.
He is an active researcher on many aspects of customer management. He is author or co-author of many articles and thirty books on customer management, many of them with Neil Woodcock, Chairman of the Customer Framework The UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing listed him in 2003 as one of the world’s top 50 marketing thinkers, he was nominated as one of the 20 most influential people in the direct marketing industry in a Precision Marketing readership poll in 2003, while NOP World nominated him in 2004 as one of 100 most influential individuals for their input and influence on the development and growth of e-commerce and the internet in the UK over the previous 10 years.