The customer is king

Four pioneers from different industries tailor CRM technology to better their customer relations.

Nordstrom's salespeople are getting ready to throw out their little black books.

Instead of filling pages with hand-scrawled notes about customers' sizes and designer preferences, 20,000 sales clerks at the Seattle chain's 137 stores soon will be using new software and mobile devices to track their customers' tastes and match them to new merchandise arrivals and store promotions.

The applications, which will be available via new point-of-sale and mobile devices that are in development now, include Blue Martini Clienteling software for managing customer product information and preferences, and Blue Martini Relationship Marketing for creating targeted messages for customers. The software will gather data from sales transactions and correlate it with data the salespeople input.

What makes this aspect of Nordstrom's CRM effort unique is that it's intended for in-store employees. CRM rollouts usually stop short of the retail sales floor, and often, valuable customer data collected at the POS goes unused by retailers.

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Click to see: Early Adopters

Instead of filling pages with hand-scrawled notes about customers' sizes and designer preferences, 20,000 sales clerks at the Seattle chain's 137 stores soon will be using new software and mobile devices to track their customers' tastes and match them to new merchandise arrivals and store promotions.

The applications, which will be available via new point-of-sale and mobile devices that are in development now, include Blue Martini Clienteling software for managing customer product information and preferences, and Blue Martini Relationship Marketing for creating targeted messages for customers. The software will gather data from sales transactions and correlate it with data the salespeople input.

What makes this aspect of Nordstrom's CRM effort unique is that it's intended for in-store employees. CRM rollouts usually stop short of the retail sales floor, and often, valuable customer data collected at the POS goes unused by retailers.

Historically, the three pillars of CRM have been sales, marketing and service. Sales applications were built around salesforce automation and have grown to include account management, opportunity management and incentive compensation management. Typical users are direct sales staff and the management teams who monitor sales pipeline information.

Marketing applications run the gamut from advertising and e-mail marketing campaigns to lead management and customer analytics. Typical users are in corporate marketing departments. Service applications encompass field service automation and contact center capabilities. Typical users work in call centers or in the field handling customer service requests.

But after a blizzard of high-profile CRM failures over the past few years - marked by unrealistic goals and ill-suited functional choices - companies are looking not just at the three traditional CRM buckets, but at what makes sense for their businesses.

For Nordstrom, what makes sense is getting customer information to retail sales personnel in real time, whether those customers are conducting business on the Web, in the store or over the telephone.

In Nordstrom's case, if a new shipment of a specific brand of shoes arrives in the store, a salesperson could be prompted to notify customers who like that brand, either by sending an e-mail message or calling a customer directly, depending on the customer preferences.

Typically, those who are selling on the retail floor depend on walk-in traffic to make a sale. Blue Martini's software gives Nordstrom's salespeople a virtual edge to establish stronger ties with their repeat customers.

Service with a smile

Even though CRM has been around for at least a decade, customer service remains a trouble spot, particularly over the Internet.

In its latest study, CustomerRespect.com found that 37% of Fortune 100 companies offered no reply to a general inquiry submitted to their Web site - despite offering either an online form or e-mail contact.