Met’s CRM Punks Out

“I don’t understand it,” Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten said after record label EMI, outraged by the band’s behavior, voided its contract. “All we’re trying to do is destroy everything.”

I don’t know about “everything,” but an incident involving the Sex Pistols and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I’m a member, shook my view of customer relationship management. Rotten the nihilist would be pleased.

The backstory: Last year the Met hosted “AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion,” an exhibit featuring Vivienne Westwood designs. (Westwood created the Sex Pistols’ look during the band’s 1970s heyday.) Lured by a residual affection for the Pistols’ song “Pretty Vacant,” I saw the show and was impressed enough to want the catalog. It wasn’t immediately available, but the Met’s bookstore staff was collecting contact information and promising to alert potential buyers when it came into stock.

A month passed without a word. AngloMania closed. On a whim I stopped back into the Met’s bookstore, where I saw stacks of the catalog near the cash register. While I was mildly irked at having taken the time to volunteer my contact information weeks before, I let the incident slide and bought a copy.

It wasn’t hard to rationalize the museum’s failure to follow through. Mine is the lowest tier of membership, and the book wasn’t especially expensive. It cost more than a poster, but less than, say, a piece of faux Egyptian jewelry.

So I chalked up the lack of contact to the Met’s economic indifference, and was fine with that. Until a few weeks later, when I received a phone call informing me copies were available.

And that’s when my faith in CRM was called into question.

A phone call is an expensive way to contact a prospect, even an interested one, especially since I’d given the museum my e-mail address. And they knew I was no big spender: Their records should have reflected my inexpensive membership, comparatively few visits and the price of the item requested. Couldn’t someone have reached across the organization, gathered all the data on hand and discovered that I was a poor prospect for a comparatively expensive outreach?

And then I realized that aggregating and analyzing all that data, and knocking out those of us who’d purchased the catalog (which they could have known, as I presented my membership card for a discount) would have required the museum to invest in both hardware and employee time. Keeping a simple contact list of those of us who requested the book — even if it did, as I suspect, languish in an inbox until someone had a free afternoon to make calls — ultimately may have been the lowest-cost CRM option.

But the economic question remains: Did the Met blow an opportunity to improve my value as a patron (by offering related items, or perhaps by getting me to upgrade my membership), or was true customer intelligence simply too expensive to be worthwhile in this case? If the latter, what does that say for the value of CRM?

Nice work, Johnny Rotten. You’ve taken another step toward destroying everything.

W

For more of Richard H. Levey’s Loose Cannon columns, visit http://directmag.com/opinions-columnists/loosecannon/index.html.