| Experts
Archive |
 There has been a certain amount of scepticism surrounding CRM in the past, but now it seems like everyone is doing it. Is this the case?
Andy Wood, MD, GI Insight |  |
Communicating intelligently with existing customers is critical, and marketing spend is heavily weighted towards this pool. But businesses cannot afford to neglect prospecting activity. So, what techniques can businesses adopt to ensure that the search for new customers is both targeted and cost-efficient ?
David Jefferies, Marketing Director, Pitney Bowes | |
How can I apply the principles of unified communications to CRM to boost productivity and enhance service?
John P. Joseph, VP Corporate Marketing, Envox Worldwide | |
What makes excellent service?
Mark Greatrex, Product and Services Director, Lakeview | |
What are best practices for displaying ads in email newsletters?
Andrew Osterday, Solutions Director, eMarketing, Premiere Global Services | |
|
|
| Experts Panel |  Meet some of the leading gurus in the marketplace that have joined the Experts Panel of CRM2day.
Learn more about their fields of expertise. |
|
| Ask the Experts |  Are you a member of CRM2day and want to share your questions with our Experts Panel, regarding any current hot CRM issues?
Take this challenge and ask them for free! |
|
|
|
 | Laura Preslan, Research Director, AMR Research, Inc. You Asked
What key factors should retailers consider for successful multi-channel customer experience? | | |
The Expert's Answer
Retailers are creating true multichannel experiences for customers by providing seamless, ongoing, personalized interactions throughout the shopping process. Hosted business-to-consumer e-commerce platforms play an important role in the evolution toward mature customer intimacy.
The Bottom Line: Retailers can take advantage of e-commerce hosting to get a jump start on the multichannel experiences as long as careful attention is paid to the integration points with internal systems.
What It Means: Retailers are in one of the following three phases in their journey toward a multichannel customer experience:
- Phase 1 - Plans are on the drawing board. The existing architecture does not support multichannel processes or analytics. After initial forays into this model several years ago, most retailers are reevaluating their strategy and are in this category. -
- Phase 2 - The strategy is partially rolled out. Retailers have started to integrate their contact centers, ecommerce, and in-store systems. Many manual workarounds still cause excess work and poor customer interactions.
- Phase 3 - The strategy has been achieved and the technical architecture, revamped business processes, and new corporate goals support multichannel customer interactions. Retailers such as Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Staples, and Coldwater Creek fall into this category.
Many retailers have been assessing a hosted approach for their e-commerce sites. Hosting is a very viable option for those companies that want to jump-start their Websites and believe that a hosting vendor will be better able to create and support the system.
Those retailers that want to get a jump start on their e-commerce strategy must keep the following integration points in mind to ensure that the system builds toward the long-term vision of cross-channel customer intimacy.
Aside from the typical hosting considerations of availability, security and privacy, maintenance, and payment integration requirements, there are specialized integration points that are paramount to achieving customer intimacy. These integration points are as follows:
- Contact center - Often hosting vendors provide contact center or customer service support specifically for the e-commerce channel. Transaction information must be integrated with the retailer’s overall contact center systems so that purchases, cases, returns, and other information is available across channels.
- Inventory - Inventory information must be integrated in real time across the hosted Website, warehouse, and merchandising system. Too many retailers do this as part of the end-of-day batch reconciliation process; to be truly multichannel, this must be done in near real time. Ensure that the hosting provider can accommodate this requirement.
- Promotions - Hosting vendors typically provide a portal that merchandisers use to create Website promotions, along with other product related actions. These promotions must be recognized across channels—especially at the Point of Sale (POS). This requires that serial redemption codes be matched across channels. This is a difficult problem that few retailers have worked out with their hosting vendor today. In addition, promotion details from the Website must be integrated back into the internal demand planning system so that the right products are available.
- Gift card integration - Among other payment types, gift card usage across channels sticks out as a high priority as usage is continuing to expand. Outsourcers typically partner with a certain gift card provider. If it is not the same one as is used in the store, retailers may be stuck with gift cards that cannot be redeemed across channels. This is a passable strategy for the short term, but in the next 6 to 12 months, competition will make this a bigger issue.
Conclusion: Retailers that need to revamp their Websites quickly find that a hosted provider can get a new site up and running in 3 to 4 months versus the 9 to 12 months that it typically takes to create and set up the architecture internally. If hosting is chosen, ensure that each of the integration points above has been considered. Look to proven hosted products from such companies as Amazon, Digital River, GSI, Fry Interactive, and VCommerce.
Copyright © 2005 AMR Research, Inc.
|
Laura is responsible for AMR Research’s initiatives in the Customer Management market with a focus on maximizing the business value of CRM initiatives. Laura has spent her career helping organizations tackle the business issues of technology projects including strategy development, business/IT alignment, change management, and business process redesign.
AMR Research, Inc.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Document Type
