goodbye pMetrics
Looked good but you forgot the cardinal rule of CRM.
It takes 3 years to win a new customer and a mere 3 seconds to lose a customer.
I was away for two weeks so didn't have time to follow the 'soap opera'.
flowery twats
I am working in Oxford and booked into this small hotel overnight. I arrived at 18.30 and rang the bell. No one is home.
I phoned the company who made the booking to get the phone number. They call the hotel on my behalf. Guess what. No one is home.
The helpful man from LateRooms asked if I could wait around in the cold for 30 minutes to 'see if someone turns up'.
I was convinced my ears had deceived me and asked him to repeat this suggestion. I politely decline his kind offer so he consults his supervisor and offers to find me another hotel.
I reply that I wouldn't trust him to tell me the time of day and hang up. I then drive aimlessly around Kidlington until I happen to locate the Holiday Inn. Thankfully, this hotel has a person manning reception and rooms available.
Later, the proprietor of the Happy Lodge calls me to explain the situation. Not to apologise but just to explain the situation.
When I made the booking, I indicated I would be arriving around 19.00 so that is when someone would have been around to greet me. So it was actually my fault all along. Of course, I see now. Everything is crystal clear. It was my mistake. How stupid of me.
The proprietor thinks I owe her an apology because she had to turn a couple away from booking the room allocated to me but now unexpectedly vacant at short notice.
I disagreed and politely suggested that maybe, just maybe, she might owe me an apology.
The lady disagreed but helpfully suggested that next time I stay at the Happy Lodge, I make an effort to arrive at the designated time and not half an hour earlier.
I count to two and half before exploding: 'Sorry but there will be no need for that because I will not be staying at the Happy Lodge. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not ever'.
smoke and mirrors
Many years ago, in a parallel universe not far from here, I was involved in a CRM 'proof of concept'. This involved producing a demonstration of a callcenter application accessing customer and product data from disparate legacy systems in a polished, unified, modern user interface.
The scenario was pretty standard fare. A motor insurance company where a customer calls in to renew his motor policy and the callcenter agent walks through a standard 'question-answer-retort' guided dialogue.
The demo climaxes in a superb cross-sell to add the customers son who has just turned 17 as a named driver to the existing policy (the pre-sales guy was positively orgasmic about this addition) with a substantial discount as part of some campaign.
Now, choosing names is very important so of course the demo initially used dead pop stars, politicians, historic figures, alternative comedians and footballers. This was mainly because the marketing guy thought TEST USER wouldn't impress the CEO's of blue chip companies.
The initial novelty of using celebrity names soon wore off as we struggled to make the software components actually do what we wanted. In fact, we were desperately tired of the endless repetitions of the dialogue ('Take 369'), that we were completely oblivious to the names appearing.
We were just hoping and praying just that the demo behaved and ran through to completion without an hourglass, a blue screen or an unexpected 'cross-sell' opportunity emerging from the 'Home, Buildings & Contents' division.
Finally, the proof of concept was finished, we were exhausted and the demanding marketing man was (finally) happy.
Imagine our surprise, a few weeks later when he returned with two complimentary CD's. 'Great job guys. The Sales MD was absolutely delighted and thinks this collateral will really help us make that breakthrough into SME in Q3. I thought you might be curious to see the fruits of your labour.'
So we thanked him, waved goodbye, then sat down to watch the CD. We were both genuinely dumbfounded when the following words, spoken in best BBC English, came out of the tinny PC speaker:
'Norman Whiteside of Manchester is looking for a competitive quote for his car insurance. '
30 second guide to CRM
Another in the recently launched and incredibly unsuccessful '30 second guide' series.
After learning all about data warehousing, I didn't see Sue for a while. I assumed she was working elsewhere on a long term project. However, after 18 months I finally managed to track her down.
For some inexplicable reason, she had left IT (and data warehouses behind). She lived, alone but content, in a Crofter's cottage in a remote part of Scotland making tartan rugs. She looked a little surprised but pleased to see me on her doorstep.
'So Sue - what about all this CRM stuff ?'
Sue sighed. 'Norman - what do you want to know now ?'
'Well - the let's take this Pareto Principle for starters'
'The Pareto Principle states that for all businesses, 20% of the customer base delivers 80% of the profit.'
'Oh I see. Well how do I identify that elusive, profitable 20% ?'
'That, Norman, lies at the very heart and is the central tenent of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Solving that problem is the Holy Grail of CRM'.
'Oh I see. I keep hearing these clever marketing types talking about "propensity to churn". Are they feeling unwell ?'
'Propensity to churn refers to the likelyhood of customers terminating their contract and going elsewhere. If you have always bought your gas from British Gas for 24 years, always had a BT phoneline and always used the same bank, then your 'propensity to churn' is low. If you switch mortgages every two years chasing the cheapest rate, then your 'propensity to churn' is much higher.'
'I see. So what is a segment ?'
'A segment is a simply a set of customers. Remember sets and Venn diagrams at school. Take the set of all male customers. Take the set of customers aged 30-35. Take the set of customers earning over 40K. Take the intersection of all three sets. That is a segment.'
'Well that's easy enough. And what about this so-called nirvana of 1:1 marketing ?'
'Marketing people think that the smaller and more selective a segment is, then the higher the chance of selling to that segment. The smallest segment (with the highest possible chance of selling) is obviously a single person. However, you need a lot of criteria (information about the individual) to derive a segment of one. However, that is what marketeers dream of at night.'
'I see. What about a channel ?'
'Telephone, TV, radio, internet, newspapers, letters, billboards - any way in which you can interact with a company'
'Err - how do I 'interact' with a billboard ?'
'You may not think it but you are sublimally reading the marketing message.'
'Lifetime value ?'
'Exactly what it says on the tin. How much money are you worth over your lifetime to a company. One element of the Pareto Principle is that some customers (out of the 80%) are bring in less money than they cost to administer. People who pay off their credit card balance in full every month are just one example. Identifying these customers and losing them may actually be beneficial to the business.'
'One last question. What is cross-sell and up-sell ?'
'Cross-sell is selling you home insurance when you call to renew your motor policy. Up-sell is selling you that Uninsured Loss Recovery that no-one understands, wants or needs or the expensive travel insurance bundled with your holiday.'
'Well Sue. Thanks a lot. That was really informative but you did drone on for rather more than 30 seconds.'
'I know Norman. That's the nature of CRM for you. Cliches and 24 words where 1 would suffice. Would you like a rug in the Brightside tartan to take home with you ?'
CRM by stealth
I was travelling on a train in Stockholm today when a man walked through the carriage selling something. Unlike London, he wasn't flogging copies of the 'Big Issue' to feed his dog or demanding money with menaces.
Instead, this gentleman simply proceeded to place small cards on each vacant seat. He did this very quietly and politely and then returned to his original position. Despite craning my neck and desperately trying to look at the cards while simultaneously trying to look completely disinterested, I couldn't actually discern what was on offer.
This lapse was caused by an innate fear of missing my stop and spending another 75 minutes trapped, wandering aimlessly in the rabbit warren that is Stockholm Central Station. However, I managed to determine that it was either an English language school with beautiful, buxom blonde teachers or Stockholm's newest lap dancing bar.
To my amazement, after 2 minutes, the gentleman repeated his walk through the carriage, reclaimed all of the cards which had lain undisturbed by any passengers. He then disembarked, presumably to repeat the exercise on another train.