Batting leadoff in your CRM efforts: smart employees

(Dec 18 2009) CRM Blog

Categories:
Technologies: Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Blog, ERP, ERP Blog, Green IT, on-demand, SaaS, web-based

Authors



  1. By Chris Bucholtz

    A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how new generations of CRM could help improve the status of knowledgeable employees within their organizations. In thinking back on that, I realized that this, like much of CRM, this is the automation and up-scaling of a practice that’s ages-old – relying on employees who know their stuff to make the customer’s experience pleasant for them and profitable for their organizations.

    An example from my past got me thinking about this. My first job after college was for the San Francisco Giants. The team had just gone from being on the verge of leaving town for Tampa to being purchased by local interests who then signed the reigning MVP. Things were looking up, and the fan base – the team’s customers – were really excited.

    The retail department staff was pretty good about understanding what customers wanted. This was not because they had an operational CRM system in place. It was because, to a person, every member of that staff had started as a fan (or customer) before being hired by the team. They had a customer’s insight into what fans would relate to, and what kind of branded merchandise would be appropriate. In a B2C environment, if your staff is enthusiastically buying what you’re selling, then you’ve got it made.

    For Giants fans, there were three distinct customer preferences that were proven out by sales. The first, and the most obvious was that fans loved the current team; items with the current logo or images of the star players (Will Clark, Robby Thompson, Matt Williams and some other guy, who I believe hit from the left side of the plate) sold well. A major subset of this were people who closely identified with the players; mock jerseys with players’ names and numbers sold well, and we did an astonishing business in authentic gear like jackets, hats and batting practice jerseys. Most fascinating to me was the sale of authentic jerseys; even back then, they were expensive, but for an additional pile of cash you could get your name and number on the jersey. This was done at the same place and by the same people who did the actual team jerseys, so your “JOE SCHMOE #44” jersey might be sewed just before a new, fresh “BONDS #25” for the clubhouse guy. That’s a degree of authenticity we talked up to the customers.

    The next preference that was interesting was the desire for something that harkened back to the old days. Vintage stuff moved really well – from old New York Giants hats to high-end old-time jerseys made by Ebbets Field Flannels. The connection to the sport established at an early age made nostalgia and a desire to re-connect to simpler times a big driver of sales. (This was not limited to the customers, by the way; the second year of the new ownership’s tenure, after the nightmare of the day-glo 1970s togs and the faux-retro 1980s look, the team reverted to uniforms that aped the style worn in the 1960s at the direction of managing partner Peter Magaowan.) 

    The final preference was for local interest. The team was connected to the San Francisco Bay Area in a very intimate way, so when there was a way to link the Giants to a local cause – or to a local icon –it drove selling behavior. Specifically, I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead/Giants combination clothing that made a big splash in 1993 – it sold like hotcakes. Who knew Deadheads were squarely in the San Francisco baseball demogaphic?

    Anyway, what I just took 350 words to explain was, essentially, understood internally by all the employees. These were the things that worked. If a customer made a suggestion, and it was a good one, it would click immediately with the employee, who would become its advocate, and three weeks later the suppliers would have that product for us – and it would sell. It worked great. You had a reliable focus group in-house, and that team batted nearly 1.000 in predicting how well items would sell.

    The next year, however, things changed. A new head of retail was brought in from a major department store and sadly, she knew nothing of baseball. The input of the employees shrank to zero and with it the feedback from the customers. Not coincidentally, sales slumped and merchandise began to pile up in the warehouse. To this manager, the cause for this was not the de-valuation of the employees and the knowledge they brought to the table, but the merchandise itself. The capper came when she brought in an apparel consultant from her past career in department stores to radically alter what we were selling; his first proclamation was that orange and black was an ugly color combination, and that the team should consider changing its colors to something like blue.

     If you know anything about baseball, it’s apparent that that advice is sacrilege for two reasons. One, the Giants have had the orange and black colors since 1948, 10 years before they moved to San Francisco. Second, blue is the color of the Dodgers – the hated, reviled and much despised Dodgers. When Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda said he bled Dodger blue, then-Giants infielder Duane Kuiper quipped that many fans in San Francisco would be eager to see if that were true. Giants fans abhor the Dodgers on an almost legendary level. Suggesting that the Giants clad themselves in that most hated of colors was perhaps the ultimate failure to understand the customer.

    It was probably the wrong thing to take to the ownership – the tradition-loving ownership. Oops.

    In any case, the 1994 baseball lock-out obviated these issues and allowed the team to re-build its retail customer relationship efforts from the ground up, and I moved on, burdened by an inane amount of merchandise and memorabilia – and the knowledge that in B2C cases when the employee is the customer, the organization that empowers the employee will win every time. 


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