This is great stuff on co-creation of value. Take this book, mix it with The Experience Economy, a dash of CRM at the Speed of Light and the future is ours, man!!
! (*****)
This is a groundbreaker, folks. One that you should be reading right now.
Go. Shoo. Go get it now.
It is affecting you as you read this, whether or not you know that. Seminal work on what has been a transition to a new type of economy. (*****)
If this book didn't spend so much time proclaiming its manifesto and explained it a little more, it would be a disruptive innovation unto itself.
It is a powerful and often metaphorically lovely book about the new customer a few years before that customer even knew it was what the cluetrain crew train said it was. A great book but strident as hell. This was a more important book than many realize it was.
Or is. (****)
If marketing is something you do, then this book is something you read. Not only does this dynamic book look at marketing in a contemporary fashion - with the customer at the center - but it also helps you figure out how to (finally!
) measure your activities and results. A genuinely refreshing brace of business thinking in a field that needs it. (*****)
This is a revolutionary book.
I love this book (partially because it validates everything I say :-)) because it recognizes that the "enterprise logic" of managerial capitalism is no longer sufficient to interest a consumer who is trying to control his/her own value. There's so much more..
.. (*****)
This is a you gotta read, read.
Jim is a board member of CRMGuru, has won numerous academic honors, is a real world CRM consultant, runs marathons, and can write up a storm. He thinks out of the box and then provides approaches to how you can. This book is undegoing updating but is well worth it as is.
Get it. Now. What are you waiting for?
Hurry up!! (*****)
The ultimate guide to implementation of CRM.
This book is about as practical as it gets. Just lays it right out and boom, you should have an idea of what you have to consider when it comes to CRM. (*****)
This is the best book on CRM EVER written.
So I say. And it is written by me and so I pass judgment on myself. (*****)
As Donna points out, this is an ironic title.
All contact centers are already "real-time." None the less this is both cutting edge and definitive and reading it is a must (*****)
Take a look the right. You'll see that there's no counter anymore on the DirecTV side.
Why, you all ask? That is curiouser and curiouser..
.devotees of Alice In Wonderland might think, lifting their eyebrows.
It's gone because I had what turned out to be a very pleasant and productive chat with the new Senior Vice President (3 weeks on the job) of DirecTV Customer Care, Ellen Filipiak about not just what I saw as my gripes with DirecTV but what I saw as their CRM issues - all those outlined in prior posts.
She was candid and because she is THAT new and I admired her candid responses and her charm too, that I won't repeat what she told me. But I will mention what we've worked out.
Ms.
Filipiak has agreed that she will post the status of the DirecTV transition from anti-customer (in fairness, my term, not hers) to customer-centric on this blog every two months starting with a post on June 1.
I believe her and with that, down comes the counter.
June 1, 2007
August 1, 2007
October 1, 2007
December 1, 2007
I think that she's a good person and was honest and forthright with me.
So let's cut her some slack, give her some time and hope that we get the authentic picture from her on what's going on with DirecTV.
Industry watchers and DirecTV customers take note.
I know I'll be watching more than just TV here.
On Monday, I spoke to DirecTV's Office of the President and ran into an account manager, who, as everyone did, apologized to me for the shoddy treatment they received and then, when I asked her to read the blog entry which of course catalogs this whole sordid affair, she said:
I asked to speak to a supervisor.
This was Monday morning at about 9:30 PST or so.
They said that a supervisor from the President's team would call me back between 24 48 hours.
I gave them my cell phone and office phone to call.
Its now just short (4 hours) of 72 hours.
And I'm waiting for that call.
...
Comcast and other cable companies got the Major League Baseball package last night.
Just a thought right now.
Next entry after this one is gonna be the Neighborhood America profile.
But today, I'm REALLY tired. Woke up at 2:00am and never went back to sleep. So I'm taking a break from my preparations for the certification series on social media and business that's being co-taught by me and Chris Carfi, the social customer guru who runs the (what else?
) , one of the most influential business-focused, way cool, 2.0 blogs in the industry. We're opening in San Francisco on March 27-28.
If you're interested, go to the and sign up. This is a good time to do it. You can still get the discounts, and if I love you, I might be able to get you a great deal or even a free pass to the course.
But I have to love you.
Here goes.
Companies to Avoid Like the Plague - You're gonna know these companies because they're big and famous and gross.
First, Creative Labs - the Soundblaster people. Why, because they truly suck at customer service. I have yet to run across a company that is either so grossly incompetent that is actually staggers the mind or just doesn't really care about customers.
The short story: I have a problem with their wireless G55W 5.1 speakers, which just don't seem to configure correctly. I also have an X-Fi Gamers Edge card that came with my new system (I'm so mad, I'm not even gonna give them the benefit of a product link).
I've been emailing with their tech support guys since the beginning of February. Why that long? It takes them 5-7 days to respond to EACH email.
The last email indicated that I might be missing a cable. Normally, you would think that they would simply say "We'll provide you with a cable." That's all of $5.
00 worth of effort for them - including the friggin' cable. Not them. Their response is the following, word for word:
Thank you for responding to Creative Customer Support.
We appreciate the opportunity to assist you.
In response to your email, the Green, Black, and Orange cable should have been included with your Gigaworks 550W speakers. If you look on the package contents listed online (
One end of the cable should be the three Green, Black, and Orange 1/8"
minijack connections.
The other end should have RCA connections. If this cable was not included with the package, you may need to check with the place that you purchased it from to verify that you didn't get an Open-Box item. If you didn't purchase the speaker system too long ago, you should be able to exchange it through them.
If you still require assistance, please reply to this email with any previous correspondence to ensure the quickest and most accurate service.
I kid you not. They won't even send the cable, saving me what is already a massive headache with a VERY expensive speaker set and card.
Avoid these fools at all costs.
The other?
DirecTV.
I'm a premium A-list customer with them, spending a bloody fortune every month and the MLB package every summer. I needed some repair and a new install and they basically said, "hey, A-lister, thanks for your business. We TRULY appreciate it.
We'll have someone out there in a MONTH to take care of the repair and install." Then when I spoke to the supervisor, he tried to convince me to be grateful it wasn't three months! He claimed they were adding people as fast as they can.
Smart guy but I'm not convinced. As soon as I can figure out an option, I'm gonna take my A-list butt out of there.
A month.
So glad they "value" my business - at zero it seems.
CRM for Google. Gag.
- , a couple of days ago. I'd like to write a long review on the quality of the functionality and the features compared to other appropriate CRM applications/services on the market, but there isn't enough functionality to do that. After reviewing what Etelos had at their site, including a series of REALLY lame videos on the offering.
What's astounding to me is that all this offers is contact management, calendar management and scheduling and some other PIM capabilities with a sprinkling of some sales "stuff" - hard to call them functions. They try to pass off a couple of email marketing features as CRM - and that's about it. I actually thought this might be one of those really funny spoofs from "The Onion" but it was real.
This doesn't even qualify as a bad beta, nor does it fit the "throw it out there because we can get fast feedback in a web 2.0 world" sort of way. It simply stinks.
SAP Moving Back to Apps? Heard It On The Grapevine - In the midst of all the buzz around Oracle's purchase of Business Intelligence vendor, Hyperion for $3.3 billion - the same Hyperion that runs a lot on top of SAP applications, and in fact has 55% of its financial base with SAP applications, AMR's Bruce Richardson made this curious statement in his (really):
"In recent days, I have been hearing that SAP is moving away from stressing its position as a platform vendor and moving back to emphasizing its strength as the applications leader.
Indeed, SAP issued a statement yesterday saying that "the Hyperion deal is one more way that Oracle attempts to hide the fact that applications is not its core business, whereas applications has been, and will continue to be, SAP's core business."
Last week, John Hagerty wrote about SAP's purchase of Pilot Software, an early pioneer in executive information systems and maker of PilotWorks, a strategy management and execution monitoring suite. He wrote that SAP "is starting to get aggressive in filling gaps in its vision.
"
I haven't heard that anywhere else, but if last week's CRM conference is a marker, I didn't really get the more democratic "we're a platform that can work with anything" vibe from the event. It was more "we're SAP and we've got a smokin' hybrid model." So maybe he's right.
It bears investigation. It would be good news for salesforce.com and bad news for Oracle if that's the case.
Finally, The Onion for Real - You ever read The Onion?
If not, you should. Its a newspaper (print) and online presence that pretty well mocks everything with fake and sometimes prescient headlines (they had a mocking article on a 5-blade razor and voila, the comes out a few months later. Even sadder, I actually use it.
). , a product that will revolutionize launching products. A riot.
. Even better, a product that will destroy everything Google can't index. Although maybe that was the Wall St.
Journal...
.? Nah.
They are just so cool.
My degree is in journalism. I love newspapers.
It is just AWESOME to me to read a Sunday paper and even the ads for (geek alert) Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA and others and drink a good cuppa Kona café while perusing the press.
Even better…do all that and I go downstairs into my basement home theatre dubbed the Ecenter and put on something ranging from classical to Christina Aguilera's Back to Basics, or the new tone poem from Norah Jones and read the paper and sip the java.
Ummm.
Ummm.UMMM.
But I think its been pretty obvious that one of the domains most shaken up by the web 2.
0 world has been media and particularly the print media which is ignored by the younger set for the far more visceral audio tunes of podcasts and iPod songs and the even more engaging visual delights of Web and soon to be ubiquitous mobile video from the likes of YouTube and ESPN.
Let me make this blatantly clear.
would you rather see?
Or This?
I rest my case.
The fact is though, that we're not just viewing things from a visceral standpoint when it comes to reporting.
Actually, with all the blasts at the media, and all their exaggerations, vagaries, overhype of stories that are meaningless; their pandering to the lowest levels of taste found this side of Twinkie and their clear and unadulterated claims of no-bias when that's absolutely impossible, the truth be told, most reporters in the print media or on TV are honest professionals - and I emphasize the words "honest" and most germane to this blog entry "professional."
That means that user-created content and collaboration with the customer and "citizen journalism" buzzwords aside, they know more as professionals than we do as amateurs - usually. Not always.
See, I'm gonna be a 2.0 heretic here. Meaning that despite my clear love of the entire Web 2.
0/CRM 2.0 "thing", I'm gonna violate the temple of 2.0 culture and say something that (horrors) I know that people who love all things 2.
0 don't want to hear.
All user-created content isn't good.
Yes.
Once again.
All user created content isn't good.
The movement that is creating the onrush of user created content is good.
But a LARGE chunk of what is created by the users sucks big time. I mean, did you see those horrible user created commercials on the SuperBowl? That "Chevy Car Wash" winner of the College Ad where guys couldn't get their hands off a Chevy and stripped down as they stroked it.
Not really funny. Professionally produced, amateur written.
That would be this one.
Okay, but enough. What I'm saying is that this isn't the era of "anti-professional" just the era of "self-expression," some of which indicates serious talent, some of which indicates serious vitamin deficiencies. So be discriminating.
There is something important valuable about people who are experts in their craft and love it perhaps too, and something important about customers' desire to collaborate and participate in activities that both enhance their own experience and benefit the companies that they are utilizing to enhance that experience.
All in all, the qualified meaning of co-creation of value. Not the unqualified adulation of user-created content.
All of which brings me to something I found very interesting in the world of the print media.
Gannet is a Bird; Its a Plane (well, no it isn't) Gannett is a Media Chain
Innovation springs from places that are often unexpected. While the major media like the Washington Post and the NY Times are making admirable efforts to digitize and be more "relevant" - their efforts tend to be more toward the purist social network side of the 2.0 electronic house. Oddly, the effort is springing from a source that I wouldn't have expected. The ownership of the newspaper that sits outside your hotel room door most every morning you're there - yes, USA Today and bigger YES, The Gannett News chain.
They are leading a charge that according to a , is radically transforming the way that they (and hopefully, other print media) do business:
They will be "incorporating elements of reader-created "citizen journalism," mining online community discussions for stories and creating Internet databases of calendar listings and other non-news utilities."
That is amazing when you realize that most of the other newspapers, even including the pretty surprisingly progressive . Even this slight move to the fore is considered a radical departure from the eras of , and .
So what Gannett is doing is beyond the journalists' pale.
The Gannett initiative is all encompassing and has created quite the fervor around the blogosphere. For a whole compendium of posts on the subject, there is a great blog called CrowdSourcing: Tracking the Rise of the Amateur worth looking at.
The initiatives involve transforming not just the structure and practices, but the culture of all the Gannett regional properties like the Indianapolis Star, the Des Moines Register and the Cincinnati Enquirer, among others. They don't even have newsrooms anymore but they are calling them "Information Centers." Here is the Gannett definition of that from a FAQ on it that you can read :
"The Information Center is a new way of transforming the process of gathering and disseminating news and information.
It is the evolution of the newsroom, focused on gathering the information our readers and viewers want using words, images and video and distributing it across multiple platforms: the daily newspaper, online, mobile, non-daily publications and any other media possible to meet our readers' needs. Creating an Information Center means retooling the newsroom, expanding into multimedia, embracing community interaction, shifting resources and rethinking the way a community is covered. Gannett's Newspaper Division, which has conducted a series of pilot programs to create and test the Information Center concept, organized the Center around seven key information gathering areas: digital; public service; community conversation; local; custom content; data; and multimedia.
(More about each desk below). Information Centers can be tailored to fit the needs of the individual operations in each division. "
But that's not what I want to talk about.
There is plenty out there on that. I'm focused, laser-like, dead-on, micro-directed at the "citizen journalist" part of this; the use of user-created content in this and what has been nicely called "crowdsourcing" by Springwise and many others in the biz. What biz that is, I'm not sure.
Crowdsourcing v. Pro-Am or Are They the Same?
Just to make one thing real clear.is NOT a term that applies to just the citizen journalist out there. Its a term for utilizing human resources outside the corporate firewall. So what I've written on Proctor and Gamble and their use of the scientist networks to help provide a significant percentage of their innovative ideas is crowdsourcing.
The mod community in the PC and video games world is crowdsourcing. The use of the 400,community members to design, vote on and buy the teeshirts that Threadless sells is crowdsourcing. Expert doesn't have to be the operant term.
Amateur sources who can be problem solving humans are perfectly acceptable with this approach.
The book's premise was that the greater knowledge came from the vectored results of the totality of the crowd. but it does at least explain how to approach the sourcing of crowdsourcing.
What Gannett is doing is more interesting, really. They are utilizing the strength of their professionals to, as , " "The pros do the heavy lifting and build the framework and structure..
.And the audience can come in and fill in." An example of the successful use of this in a Gannett property that seems to be circulating a lot is the Ft.
Myers News-Press found that home buyers were being hit with $30,000 bills for water and sewer line connections - WAY in excess of even the supernatural when it comes to this kind of plumbing effort. The news guys put a short item in the paper and online and asked for input from the citizens, providing the online tools for the input.
BOOM!
!
Blueprints showed up online, discussions back and forth between the journalists and citizens and between the citizens and other citizens. Then documents began to appear suggesting illegal activities.
There was increased coverage. The scandal hit. The traffic on the site (micro-site actually) became huge and the $30K was no longer the price - apparently.
This is great and a new approach to journalism that isn't new in other fields. But there are two problems. One - general.
The other - Gannett.
The quality of the material is still from amateurs and can be misleading potentially. But this is a really good thing that's going on here.
Just be aware of the misstep.
This is a notoriously cheap bunch - penny pinchers. So the suspicion is that they aren't being pioneers in something new and exciting, but cost-cutters with the appearance of something new and exciting.
So if it starts to cost something then the new and the exciting become the old and boring fast. But if they are truly trying to innovate so that they can engage the readers in a new more interactive/collaborative model of journalism, then its likely the harbinger of the CRM 2.0 approach to journalism - which is the the true citizen involvement in the stories that affect their destiny.
And that's a good thing. I just hope that it stays good.
I promised on that I would report back to everyone on my "experience" at the Washington National's "Grand Reopening" of RFK Stadium this past weekend in a game on Sunday between the Cubs and the Nationals.
The reason for this was that, in their zeal for improving the fan experience, for a last place team, they hired what is apparently a well-respected "customer experience management" firm (I HATE CEM as a term, though I admittedly use it in lieu of anything better at times), , though one that is unbeknownst to me, to train the Nats' stadium personnel in improving the "fan experience" at the ballpark.
For those of you who have been to RFK Stadium in recent years, "reopening" the ballpark is reopening the rift to hell - the ballpark is old, decrepit and has little charm beyond the team that's playing there - a team with little charm except for Alfonso Soriano, the astoundingly talented left fielding All Star for the Nationals - on his way to what may be the first 50-50 season in history - that's 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season, for those of you who aren't baseball cognoscenti.
Thing is, there is a new management.
The Nationals, formerly the Montreal Expos, were owned until yesterday (or so) by Major League Baseball, but a management team headed up by real estate mogul Ted Lerner and Atlanta zillionaire (and Hawks NBA team owner), Stan Kasten, bought them and transferred $450 million in MLB coffers this week. So, in celebration of that, the Nationals, trying to get fans to the stadium despite their last place positioning in their division, decided to "reopen" the RFK sinkhole and at least they powerwashed it.
I'll give them credit.
They tried very hard. Between outs they had constant giveaways and fan promotions, a new area for local cuisines and they did the aforementioned powerwashing. The announcer was funny with his pronouncements like "fans running on the field will be prosecuted and besides, how will it look when you tell your cellmate that you're in for running onto a baseball field?
"
Not bad and he did a lot of that. Kind of the highlight of the thing.
The work of LRA Worldwide might have gone on - apparently they trained everyone for a single day in being attuned to the fans "thinking" and improving the customer ambiance via customer service training.
But they get a C- at best, for any visible changes in stadium personnel. The only thing I can think about that might have represented their work was one of the staff who pointed us to our seat - remembered as an afterthought to say "enjoy the game."
Which I did, primarily because ex-Yankee Soriano hit a double and mammoth home run during the game.
Otherwise, the experience was non-descript. Chances are if they needed such a vivid experience, even a CEM firm wouldn't help much because the state of the stadium doesn't encourage a new beginning or feeling of "new ownership" or renewal or anything but an old, old stadium with a last place team and fans who are lukewarm.
LRA either did a great invisible job or there wasn't much they could do.
It was sad, because teams like the Philadelphia Flyers or the Yankees or the Red Sox or the Dallas Cowboys or the Packers generate a great deal of excitement when they are good or bad because they have the fans engaged in the experience and proud of the passion and commitments. They do what has to be done to make the fan part of the program. This was just a lot of marketing and polite behaviors (which was still welcome.
The stadium staff were very nice) in a ballpark that will be replaced with a new one in 2009 in Washington D.C.
Maybe they shoulda waited until then to "open" rather than "reopen.
" Reopening the door to the bathroom doesn't mean it isn't a bathroom anymore.
. The widely covered press release (I saw it in about 30 other locations from June 29 through now), says that consumers experience mobile communities on their computers for free and expect the same on their cell phones.
A focus on consumer experience, not revenue will assist adoption of mobile community services in the near term. Julie Ask Research Director of Jupiter (the company, not the planet - she'd be the Empress of Research if it were the planet), said Shifting familiar online experiences to the cell phone and enhancing them with location, messaging, personalization and presence has emerged as a popular though unproven streategy for wireless carriers to drive data usage.
Very interesting, a bit disturbing though, since the wireless carriers problems exist far beyond their inability to drive data usage.
The idea of an improved customer experience in their case should be driven not by the increased data usage it modestly promises, but by the fact that most people HATE them.
They tend to be remarkably dense on this issue.
A couple of years ago, KANA sponsored a webinar I did on Knowledge Management and Contact Centers that was attended by 210 people.
It was a wonderfully successful event. I spoke for 20 plus minutes on the subject as a thought leader (which I think really translates to they think I'm a leader..
.little do they know..
.) and it was good. During that webinar, I outlined this experience I had with Cingular when I migrated from AT T Wireless to Cingular (who, of course, owned them) so I could get a Windows Mobile Smartphone (since replaced by a Blackberry).
I thought the migration, since it was the same company, would take about 10 minutes and $18. It took 9 hours, 7 customer service representatives and somehow cost me $175.00.
My point in that particular part of the webinar was that all seven customer service reps were unfailingly polite nice people and every last one of them was wrong about what they told me. I told the phantom crowd online, so the formula was, 7 unfailingly polite representatives = I HATE CINGULAR!
The next day a VP of Customer Relations who's name escapes me called me to say that she had heard that I had trashed Cingular on the webinar and what could they do about it to make it up to me?
My response was fix the way your company works with its customers. I offered my CRM Consulting services to them as a FREE OFFER and she was, like, Oh, that would be great. I'll get back to you soon.
and I was, like, yeah, okay, sure. And she was, like, no really. And I was like, okay, I'll be waiting.
Bye.
I still am.
The point here is that mobile communities to drive data usage are a pretty short sighted way to view the customer base.
They are a lot more than just another revenue squeeze. Here is an industry that is worried sick about the churn rate, but they forget that they're churning customers, not butter. If the way they see mobile communities is strictly as a revenue strategy, then I still hate Cingular and all those mobile companies that think that way - even if they are unfailingly polite in the way they grind our expectations as customers into the dust.
Every now and then I get this uncontrollable urge to actually be practical and smart. I fight and I fight but for some reason, this intense desire for the intelligent hands on takes over and overwhelms me. I'd like to attribute it to hormones but I'm 56 and my impulses can't be explained by that - at least I don't think that there is any evidence to that effect being causal or if there is, I don't know it.
I'm sorry.
So, as a result, today I'm going to tell you the story of David's Bridal and the CVRC.
Now I know you're going to ask me - why the earth has a molten center - I can answer that, but please - stay on point.
Whassamattawitchoo?!!
!!
Okay, enough.
First what's the story with David's Bridal. Then what does CVRC stand for. Then, what does the CVRC do with David's Bridal and THAT, will neatly tie the whole story together.
Practical, down to earth and direct. Yessir.
This is a true American success story, because of their at the time (the late 90s) revolutionary model and because they are smart enough in at least some of their leadership quarters (including the CEO, thenks got, as we say in Yinglish) to recognize that what an observer of the industry called last night (at the AAA CEO Summit conference which I spoke at in Chicago yesterday), a disruptive force in the target sights of the rest of the bridal industry because their model created something that just creamed the rest of the industry, was no longer revolutionary and, in fact, could be a break on the progress toward their goals.
First, in the interests of full disclosure, they are my clients for the last four years and they are my favorite and most exasperating client simultaneously. They drive me nuts and they make me kvell like a proud daddy. I've made friends there who will be my friends for life regardless of whether or not they or I have a continued relationship with the company.
So what you're hearing here is their story, my story, and a story they know that I'm telling online about them. In fact, the co-chairman of the mysterious CVRC - patience, patience - actually presented at the AAA Conference with me because what they do is so out of the box and so compelling that it is a genuinely good story with lots of stuff that's worth hearing about and a fair number of excised zits along the way. But, since this is a blog, and I like hangin' at the edge, there will be non-NDA level full-disclosure on the process.
What they have in progress is something unique and hopefully, repeatable as an idea - though I know they don't want it repeated in the wedding apparel industry. It has a genuine practical value that goes far beyond just their niche industry - $2.4 billion.
So what's the story with David's Bridal? They are the world's largest wedding apparel and related accessories retailer. They have 260 direct stores in 46 states and Puerto Rico.
Their business model is a massive selection of wedding apparel styles with multiple sizes on the rack from the Versace's and Ralph Lauren's of the world at unbeatable prices. Their stores are high volume retail outlets, not boutique service one on one service providers. They are sales driven to a point of obsession.
They have 3% of all the wedding apparel stores in the U.S.
and 70% of the all the brides who shop for gowns pass through their portals - but don't necessarily buy.
In the 4 years I've been associated with them, I've seen their market share go from 20% to roughly 30%. They are immensely successful. Immensely.
Let's put it this way, while there are lots of issues to deal with, I was by no means there to fix something broke. They want to take what was a 20% market share and bring it up to 50% and they recognized that they had to fundamentally change their business model to do that. What is ironic and what we found out early on, thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned CVRC Co-chairman, Scott Rogers, who is also a director of marketing at the company, that if they just captured some of the business that walked in the door and then walked out and never purchased there - they could hit 50% marketshare without building a single other store than what they already had.
So step one thousand and one was identifying the problem.
Huh?
Yeah, Metaphorical Step One Thousand and One.
Because to get to the point of real breakthroughs took me and the forward thinkers at David's Bridal two years and multiple missteps and attempts by (internally) politically active management principals to trip us up too. It was painful, painstaking, and the constant pressures of the day to day jobs affected those evangelists trying to build an outside in culture that had been intensely focused on inside out sales - not customers.
Make no mistake about it.
This was and still is an intensely sales-driven culture that slams the idea of high volume traffic and moving that traffic through the stores quickly and effectively. Their customer, in their eyes, was the bride and the customer lifecycle about as long as a cicada or fruitfly - 7 months (PLEASE don't bother to look up the lifecycle of cicadas or fruitflies - I'm sure that they're WAY shorter than seven months. Just grant me a literary license for the day.
I'll pay whatever registration fees you want and fill out the paperwork). That means from the time the bride was engaged to the time that the wedding was over and the bride was whisked off by the groom (who got his duds at After Hours- also owned by David's Bridal - as is Priscilla's a high end boutique gown store with minimum pricing somewhere in the range of two grand for a gown) for all the after hours stuff that grooms and brides do and probably already did.
Yep 7 months and out.
The running joke was that repeat customers at David's Bridal undermined the moral fiber of the U.S.
Though I'm sure that we can do that on our own, thankyouverymuch.
What was astonishing is that meant that referrals especially word of mouth referrals was of world-shaking importance at David's Bridal (henceforth DB). And their business was 46% referrals.
The assumption that their value pricing and incredibly wide selection of gowns on the racks of high quality was their critical differentiator and if they provided good service they would get the referrals they needed.
Sounds good doesn't it? Yeah, baby, but there are big holes in those assumptions as our work found out.
That is - the work of the ethereally titled CVRC.
We'll get there.
The first problem that they, through all their marketing research found, was that the service wasn't so good. Now imagine this, complaints of service by people who are shopping for what might be the most important and certainly the most emotional day in their entire lives.
The results of bad service in that environment change the term from going postal to going bridal. Luckily, that didn't happen, but as their sales rose and the intensity of high volume activiity increased without massive increases in sales consultants, the service complaints increased more and more. But the selection of Versace and Ralph Lauren was so compelling and the idea of getting a super perfect gown off the rack that day or shortly thereafter was just so powerful, the sales continued.
But there was another problem. The only person who got any attention in the store - for some of the reasons mentioned above - and some limited thinking - was the bride. The bride was the goddess of the purchase.
The bridesmaids there were essentially a coterie of clothing mannequins who tried on the bridesmaids dresses that the bride picked for them. So why pay attention? After all this is event driven sales.
The centerpiece of the wedding is the same as the centerpiece of the wedding cake - the bride.
There were a buncha steps taken without me there. One of the most interesting was the creation of a point of sale system, that you'd think was a CRM system, except that it occurred after the sale had been made.
So the customer data, since they didn't expect to see the bride back after that fruitfly lifecycle ended, was not as important - except as it applied to a pre-sale - but it occurred after the sale.
This was the tip of the iceberg. What I've said here not only identifies some specific problems that were there but there are a whole series of cultural issues and mindsets that are not as obvious that had to be dealt with.
I spent two years working with several of the people - especially Scott who could be a CRM consultant on his own if he felt like it - and I got, to be polite, not very far. Lots of lip service, little action. Not much mal-intent though there was some from people who were not involved with this evangelical crew of CRM pentecostals that we created there - minus the Raptures.
Some politics damaged us. The CEO who supported us was relatively inactive but always a friend of the customer friendly.
Well, two years came along and I was sent about 300 pages of documents of different programs at David's Bridal to review to see if they were on a customer centric track and they asked for my edgy New York
style brutal assessment.
My assessment, after spending two weeks reading and writing down extensive commentary was no. But something was screaming out there and we pounded it through a a meeting with me and senior executives and the evangelists. What was clear as a bell was that like zillions of sales companies before them, DB was presuming for the customer - and that is a bad, bad thing.
So we decided to do something about it.
I went to the CEO, empowered by the David's Bridal evangelists, laid out a plan to form a committee that I called the Customer Value Review Committee (CVRC). Here's how it was set up and what its purpose was:
- Find the most customer centric decisionmakers at the company and populate the committee with them.
Keep in mind, it didn't matter what departments they represented.
- Recognition that this wasn't a CRM implementation and it wasn't a project. It was a programmatic approach to changing the culture at David's Bridal from sales-driven to customer-driven - but not a full blown CRM effort.
- Find out what the customers were actually saying and thinking - not presume for them at all.
- Do a high level process and program review to see which DB processes were customer-value friendly and which weren't. This was not a full look at each process
- Do deep customer mapping of customers that were selected by store and geography and other characteristics and interviewed by the members of the committee which were an absolute requirement.
Committee members, as customer centric as they were, had in several instances, had had little or no interaction with the customers in their recent senior management job incarnations.
- Finally, once this process was completed - over about a years time - expand the results to a pilot.
There were 7 committee members and me. We fought, laughed, loved, cried, got confused, lost focus, refocused, but at the end of it all, were able to say Amen and Hallelujah and there were several significant epiphanies on the committee particularly after the customer mapping was done and then supported by both anecdotal and metric evidence. All of a sudden what had been presumed for the customer was seen to be simply, wrong.
For example, the registration process at the front door was seen to be an event of major impact. Turned out the bride didn't even remember registering the vast majority of the time. Second, the assumption throughout DB history was that price and selection were their great differentiators.
Price wasn't. Selection was. Hmmmmm.
What was of prime importance in this was the questionnaire for the DB customers that was primarily designed by Scott with the help of members of the committee. I'd LOVE to take credit for it but it was them, not me. I only made three points.
But the breakthroughs were more profound than even that.
One of the most significant things that we found, thanks to the brainstorming, was that the customer of the present was nothing like the customer of the future. The bride was the customer of the present, with somewhat more than faint recognition that the bridesmaids were going to be brides one day.
But the customer of the future wasn't the bridesmaid, though she certainly was a potential future DB customer. The future customer is, ta da, the mother of the flower girl. Yes, the MOTHER OF THE FLOWERGIRL.
Here's how it goes.
David's sells wedding gowns (and associated accessories, of course), bridesmaid's dresses, flowergirl's dresses, junior bridesmaid's dresses, quincenera dresses for the 15 year old Latina, prom dresses, sweet sixteen outfits, etc. After several years or sooner of marriage one of the things that a bride often becomes is.
...
...
...
...
...
.the suspense is building..
...
...
...
..higher.
...
...
..higher.
...
..a mother.
Yes, a mommy, mom, mother. So the bride becomes the mother of the flowergirl, junior bridesmaid, bridesmaid, bride with all the other in between and then, boom, the bride becomes the mother of the flowergirl..
..ad infinitum and what was a 7 month one off relationship becomes a lifetime relationship with, admittedly, years between events.
But nonetheless the nature of the customer and the lifetime value equation changes dramatically as does how the company works with that customer.
There's still a long way to go at David's Bridal. We have a lot to do but they are an ablebodied group and recently, the CVRC expanded to a second circle of senior store management so that a pilot that's sanctioned by the CEO can begin with some of the stores to see how the store of the future will work.
This is very cool. I mean think about it. I have no kids.
This is my 25th anniversary, so a wedding isn't in my near future particularly, but I'm excited over wedding apparel!!
NOT THAT WAY!
!
Okay, let me rephrase it. I'm excited about David's Bridals' successful out of the box thinking.
This is a 21st century move by a company that tries to create a beautiful memory - which takes on a new visionary significance as a phrase when there's a bride AND a lifetime customer involved.
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