CRM如何才能成功?

2004-8-11 9:03:41【作者】 畅享网 【进入论坛】
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主要内容:

  • 考虑进行CRM投资前,做好充分的准备;
  • 根据自身业务特点,构建独特的分析模型;
  • CRM成功的评估标准,也因企业而异;
  • CRM建设需要高层的承诺;
  • 用户的接受是CRM成功的驱动力;
  • 为何80%的CRM实施会失败?

Counting On CRM Success
By Matt Pillar
Integrated Solutions for Retailers

Sometimes, playing the role of lead champion for a technology implementation is the most rewarding part of an otherwise reward-challenged job. Sure, you might be paid well, and if you're lucky, you might even like the folks you work with. But let's face it, being responsible for the implementation and maintenance of technology solutions in your retail operation has likely been the cause of more than a few gray hairs. Fortunately, every now and then it's that very responsibility that elevates you above the clamor of system support calls, troubleshooting, and management of implementation grunt work to near superhero status. When bottom-line savings or sales increases are attributed to a quick-payback solution that you spearheaded, your deeds are all the more heroic.

On the other hand, there are the failures, and woe to the champion of the failed technology implementation. In a hyper-competitive market, those who champion a cause and fail are fortunate to have jobs in the morning, and the failures who keep their jobs won't have an easy time championing their next brilliant idea. Perhaps that's why so many retailers put off implementing or altogether shy away from CRM (customer relationship management). Oh, there have been resounding success stories, but more often than not CRM fails. In fact, IBM's 2004 Global CRM Study says 85% of companies aren't satisfied with the success of their CRM initiatives. If your credibility depends on the success of the implementations you drive, you're probably not too thrilled with those odds.

Plan Your Way To CRM Buy-In
But hold on a minute. Since when were you one to shy away from a challenge? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, my friend. There are CRM success stories out there, and with the right approach, you, too, can live to tell one. Furthermore, if your title is anything like Aaron Cano's, you'd better either have -- or be working on -- a CRM success story of your own. Cano is VP of customer knowledge for multichannel specialty retailer 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, a company that serves as a compelling case study on why you should ditch your CRM reservations and tackle the odds, regardless that they're stacked against you.

Cano knows that CRM isn't an easy sell to the internal powers that be. While he bills his company as a customer-centric one, cost consciousness also factors heavily in its technology buying decisions. Given the perceived black magic of CRM implementations, it takes careful planning and creativity to present a case to buy. "We're not the first retailer to attempt to tie ROI to CRM, but at the end of the day, I don't think you can," says Cano. "Ultimately, the decision to implement comes down to determining how much you're willing to spend to enhance the customer experience and how confident you are that such an enhancement will impact your bottom line." Not exactly a sound business case for securing budget sign-off, is it? Fortunately, Cano knew that setting realistic expectations by clearly defining his company's CRM strategy would help him get the green light to spend money on CRM tools.

With a hefty database of customer information in hand, it was up to the CRM believers at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM to show the rest of the company what could be done with a DW (data warehouse) and some analytical tools. Demonstrating that a DW allows finite, segment-specific customer queries using data already being collected is one step toward clinching the CRM project. It's also important to focus on the efficiency gains anticipated by the ability to analyze and report on campaign success rates while the campaign is underway. Translating this flexibility from a neat feature to specific hard-dollar savings or increased sales is difficult to do, but the theory isn't hard to prove. Nonetheless, proving that theory to corporate powers is important. The IBM study claims that when CRM initiatives are driven corporately, rather than by a specific division, success rates jump by between 25% and 60%. That said, the study revealed that only 26% of respondents are practicing corporate-owned CRM initiatives. In fact, Big Blue figures that senior management at 36% of the companies it surveyed this year are actually impeding CRM progress because they view CRM as useful, but not critical. That's why securing enterprise-wide buy-in by illustrating the potential of the project to solve business problems is key to its success.

CRM can do many things, but when seeking corporate backing for a CRM initiative it's often more productive to focus first on what you can't do. For example, direct marketing is a staple for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, but as little as a year ago it couldn't gauge the success of a direct marketing campaign until well after the promotion had been signed, sealed, delivered, and paid for. Cano says it took up to two weeks to compile and analyze campaign results. Making matters worse, the company didn't have the tools necessary to segment customers efficiently prior to developing campaigns, so most direct marketing efforts were targeted poorly, if at all.

Putting The CRM Petal To The Metal
In the spring of 2003, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM invested in CRM solutions from SAS (Cary, NC) and transferred customer data it had been collecting since 1997 to a central Oracle DW. Because it's integrated with the retailer's proprietary multichannel transaction processing engine, the DW is constantly being fed with new customer data. The company uses SAS CRM for data mining, analytics, and ad hoc reporting. Shortly, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM was enjoying the real-time data its new tools provided and using that data to serve customers more intelligently. Statistical models, which once took four to six weeks to build and analyze, can now be completed in as little as two weeks. These models can help campaign management staff target campaigns and predict their effectiveness, while helping the merchandise department maintain the proper stock levels to meet anticipated demand. The company can now segment its customer base by any number of parameters in preparation for a campaign, targeting specific consumers with promotions suggested by their individual purchase histories. Then, it can manage those promotions as they happen.

"Today, we can see campaign success or failure happening in real time and gauge the success of our promotions daily. That allows us to change the focus of a campaign on the fly if necessary," says Cano. "We can change a banner on our Web site or a partner's portal, for instance, within minutes. We monitor conversion rates on these sites, and if a banner, picture, or link representing a promotion is not converting to sales, we'll change it within minutes. E-mail promotions can also be followed up in short order when the company decides to enhance or change its efforts. The power of these tools for on-the-fly maintenance of stock levels as they relate to promotion demand is obvious.

Measure Your Way To CRM Superhero Status
Retention rates, loyalty, and frequency are the measures most often used to gauge retail CRM success. Cano says these measures have been improving steadily at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM since the company signed on with SAS.

While predicting your ROI on a potential CRM implementation may be difficult, measuring the outcome of your CRM efforts once underway (or even better, during a pilot program) doesn't have to be. Simply creating a control group representative of your mass market and several test groups segmented using the target demographic, lifestyle, and purchase history information you've most likely already collected will provide a solid indicator of CRM success to come. If new customer acquisition is your goal, find prospect lists that match the profile of your target groups and throw them in the mix. Then target relevant campaigns at your test groups, hit the control group with the same campaigns, and compare the sales rates of your targeted tests to those of your mass-market approach. If you're like 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, you'll see the response to targeted programming produce 30% more sales than the mass-market approach. "It's all about hitting the right people with the right promotion," says Cano. "When you see retention numbers and repeat buyer numbers going up every year, you know you're doing something right. That's a direct result of the customer's experience, which is a result of CRM."

Building Customer Relationships Requires Commitment
Back when the Internet was a fledgling B2C commerce tool, a little flower shop chain out of New York saw the natural fit between service-oriented retailing and the convenience and 24/7 accessibility of the World Wide Web. The company was 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, and it made a name for itself as a veritable e-commerce pioneer. It survived the burst of the e-commerce bubble, but competition soon became its biggest challenge. Today, there's no shortage of ship-to-recipient gift retailers on the Internet, so the retailer has transformed its approach. It may no longer be the only player clamoring for market share in the multichannel flower delivery space, but it's determined to be the best at winning -- and retaining -- customers. The company's 2003 investment in SAS' (Cary, NC) CRM (customer relationship management) technology is evidence of its determination.

At 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, SAS' CRM solutions span the entire decision-support process for managing customer relationships. The company collects data at all of its many multichannel customer contact points, then uses SAS' Enterprise Miner data mining application to turn that data into information that helps it understand and anticipate customer behavior. Enterprise Miner handles the whole data mining process -- from data access to model deployment -- using a process-flow diagram approach presented via a GUI (graphical user interface). This eliminates the need for manual coding and enables use of the solution by even non-statistician types. The retailer uses this information to help meet its 10 million customers' merchandise and service needs, to discover the lifetime value of individual customers, and to deliver more targeted (and therefore profitable) marketing campaigns to its most valuable customers.

User Acceptance Drives CRM
While CRM at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM is an enterprise-wide initiative, the company's IT staff administers it. This is a small group, with fewer than 10 IT employees representing production, development, and support for all segments of the business. "We don't have the luxury of staffing Ph.D. statistician types," says Aaron Cano, the retailer's VP of customer knowledge. "We were looking for something a business analyst could leverage without a detailed understanding of the bits and bytes of statistical software." Cano explains that while his company had been running an Oracle DW (data warehouse) for some time, it needed an analytics tool that would create visual graphs of statistical analyses. "I could then sit down with our marketing executive and share understandable information," he says. Now, employees at many levels are using SAS to various degrees to develop targeting models and reports. "Now we can quickly understand what drives promotions, rather than sifting through information for weeks and weeks," he says.

 Why 85% Of CRM Implementations Fail
The 2004 Global CRM Study from IBM outlines a number of reasons why most CRM implementations fail, but according to the report, most of the blame rests on the shoulders of implementation attempts that lack enterprise buy-in. True, corporate must be willing to back the initiative, and store-level associates must be prepared to execute. But even with the backing of your whole company, there are pitfalls to avoid. Jill Dyche, founding partner of Baseline Consulting and author of The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management, offers the following don'ts:

  • Don't create measures without defining requirements. Establishing what business problem needs to be solved, then outlining the measurements that will ensure the solution is effective, is the right order of things.
  • Don't measure just once. CRM success measurement should be continuous. Each individual CRM project in the portfolio should be subject to regular and rigorous re-measurement.
  • Don't measure at 35,000 feet. General improvement goals such as happier customers are too high-level and subjective to be meaningful. CRM success measurement should be performed at the level of the project, not the strategy.
  • Don't overemphasize cost cutting. Saving money may be a great incentive to start CRM -- the metric of recouping costs is a common one -- but without accompanying business improvements it probably won't be bona fide CRM.
  • Don't fail to drive post-measurement improvement. Companies should acknowledge the results of their measurement efforts -- for instance, customer satisfaction scores increased, but only by 3% -- and refine accordingly.

The IBM study claims that, when clear guidelines were applied during implementation, CRM success rates were bolstered from less than 15% to greater than 70%. If the implementation of a CRM plan garnered the same respect and sense of urgency given POS and back office systems, perhaps that figure would be even higher.

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