Companies in direct marketing install CRM software, or employ CRM consulting firms, to manage their “customer retention” programs primarily with computers.
My marketing instinct tells me that we too often think of sales and marketing as a technical problem. Terms like metrics, modeling, and ROI give the impression that making sales is a mechanical matter: To be sure, marketing directors who ignore metrics and response percentages will lose money. But their faith in technology as a solution to customer relations problems is often misguided.
You might regard CRM as “customer response management,” since response is the basic (and only) goal of direct marketing, but it means a lot more as “customer relations management,” acknowledging that there is a human, non-technical aspect to sales and marketing. You’re dealing with real people and their expectations and aspirations.
We need to think of CRM without computers. Computers can track what we do, but they won’t replace common sense. In the mail order catalog business, I learned the simple lessons of CRM that never change:
Describe your product honestly, ship it on time, keep your inventory up to date so you won’t disappoint a customer, record each transaction so you can mail to the customer again, and take the product back if it doesn’t please.
Good customer relations are instinctive with successful marketers. For example, Inc. Magazine once picked Harvey’s Hardware, Needham MA, my local hardware store, as the best small business in the United States. Inc. picked Harvey’s for excellent management, but customer relations built much of the business.
Harvey and his sons manage the store and sell to customers every day. An employee meets you at the front door and walks you right down the aisles to the exact product you want. In this store, no one says, “try aisle seven”. In a fairly small building, they somehow stock almost everything you’d buy at Home Depot or a department store. After check-out, someone carries your purchases to your car, if the bags are heavy.
The Walter Drake catalog, now owned by Blyth, Inc., of Greenwich CT, was managed by its founder for 50 years before he sold the company. In his household gadgets catalog, Walter Drake used to write, “I like to get letters and I answer every one.” The company never let an inquiry go unanswered for more than a day. When a package was lost in the mail, the order was replaced immediately, because the company knew the order had been shipped within 24 hours and therefore had to be lost. Like the original company, Blyth’s Walter Drake still refunds money even on personalized items.
New Englanders regard Talbots’ worldwide retail and catalog business as their own, because many shopped in Norma Talbot’s original Hingham, MA store. Her husband Rudy started the catalog in an upstairs office. You feel the extra quality of their customer service every time you enter their stores. Now with over 700 stores, the company reported that their combined 2005 quarterly sales in direct-to-customer sales (catalogs plus Internet) increased 11% over last year in the current quarter, even though store-to-store retail sales remained level. Their CEO, Arnold Zetcher, was a worthy successor to the Talbots; he has managed the company successfully since 1988.
Maybe strong entrepreneurial companies know more about customer relations than anybody else!
Fred Morath, Fred Morath Direct, Natick, MA, has been in the direct marketing industry for close to 40 years.
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