This is page 2 of:
Bloomingdale’s And The CRM App That Associates Were Never Asked About
More importantly, if corporate understands the issues, would even corporate want it? In other words, was there likely anyone in that executive meeting room who projected the likely sales, revenue and profit reductions if this program was enthusiastically embraced by associates nationwide?
Was the possibility of this program causing a sales drop even considered? Sometimes, a little disobedience from field troops is the best thing a general can hope for.
Asking executives for feature wish lists is a long and truly terrible tradition in retail IT. Everything on a wish list costs money, and this is one of the few places where taking a hard ROI view of IT makes absolute sense.
When a CIO is asked the question, “How much will it cost to ask just one more question?” the CIO tends to answer in terms of how much storage that data will require. (Programmers and DBAs will already have to do work on applications and databases, so the incremental cost of one more question is tiny.) But every piece of CRM data that’s not used is another potential privacy and security problem, both after the data is stored and after questions are asked in the store. There’s a risk associated with that process, and risks are a potential cost that can be calculated.
If executives are willing to budget a process that asks time-consuming questions at the POS, it still should be piloted—and then rolled out progressively, and the results of the progressive rollout carefully examined. Associates are great at working around bad ideas, especially if they have the tacit approval of their managers. For example, if those managers encourage associates to collect just one missing piece of information—but only one—eventually the record will get filled in with no disruption in the sales process. But if IT doesn’t support that approach, the sales process becomes an endless series of manager overrides.
The biggest cost of adding in just one more question is that it makes it harder to do what you’re really trying to do, which is to find answers that will boost sales. The more distracting, unnecessary data in the app, the harder it is to find the answers and—frighteningly—the less likely it will be that colleagues will keep trying to find those answers.
It’s the old noise-to-signal-ratio problem. Say what you will, but corporate just loves creating noise.
Another issue: How annoyed are customers likely to get at all these prying questions coming from an associate who is delaying closing the deal by asking for information that’s not required to hand over money?
Again, this is a place where store associates have a much clearer understanding of how much customers will take. The last thing you want is to upset a high-end customer because an associate insists on asking for the phone number of a summer home before handing over the merchandise.
Unless you make a lot more money from CRM than from selling products, of course.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
