Getting perspective on the road to one-to-one Those of us who write frequently about the new landscape of customer-centric commerce are often the most critical of small failures, of someone’s not achieving the goal they’ve set. We – even the CRM faithful – sometimes lose our perspective. And we know better than most that becoming a customer-focused enterprise is not a destination but a journey.
The first steps in that journey falter at times. We are clearly in a period of development and adaptation. One-to-one is still in its early stages with high aspirations, and too often we disparage companies experiencing growth pains, not yet achieving the full promise. Maybe it’s time for those of us who do the books and speeches to “cut a little slack” and applaud the effort of the glass half-full.
Flash forward. Ten years from now, we’ll all look back and realize: There we were at the start of a major economic transformation. The lessons of the one-to-one pioneers will have been learned, and what they did to move their businesses to new plateaus may even be taken for granted. At the same time, we will be looking for new peaks to climb, because who will ever be able to say that their relationships with customers are as good as they could be?
The one-to-one future does promise moving from a product-centric to a customer-focused environment. The needs and desires of individuals become the drivers of innovation and progress – “pull” rather than “push.” We look for a learning relationship between vendor and buyer.
Have you heard all this before? Of course. But what you often don’t hear and where champions of one-to-one are at fault is that there are many living, breathing examples of companies that have started the relationship journey but still have a distance to travel for full return on their investment. Here are just three examples from recent issues of our INSIDE 1to1 newsletter:
A LUXURIOUS MARKETING SHIFT Ashford.com, a luxury e-tailer in Houston, TX, has identified its most valued customers, begun to differentiate the way they buy online, and tailored its site to these different needs. It has shifted its marketing dollars from mass campaigns to targeted, online efforts, and it has seen a measurable rise in revenues from existing customers – quantifiable, early stage ROI.
Zane’s Cycles in Branford, CT, has as its credo, “building trust with customers on a one-to-one level.” Because the company understood its customers’ needs and developed lifelong learning relationships with them, it has been so successful in its consumer business that it turned to the business-to-business arena, supplying corporate clients with bicycles for customer incentives.
eBags, a luggage and handbag e-tailer, practices “high-tech, high-touch,” offering its site visitors the ability to talk with a customer rep by phone or live text-based chat. It personalizes the site for customers according to previous purchases and site-viewing history. This attention to customers’ needs, the company says, helps explain its 50% growth in revenue each month since its launch in March 1999.
Now these are not the Amazons and Charles Schwabs and Cisco Systems of the world. They are not the mega-brick-and-mortar companies like JC Penny now beginning to move their enterprises in the right direction. But they deserve to be cited and celebrated.
Whenever someone starts down the road to identify, differentiate, interact and customize – and long before there is sure-footed integrated management and implementation of CRM strategies – we need to give credit.
Let’s face it. One-to-one is not easy. It is a journey we have all barely begun.
Network
