CRM and ERP News

Wal-Mart reportedly isn't saving as much from using RFID technology to manage its supply chain as had been expected. If true, that would be bad news for both Wal-Mart in particular and the Dallas area in general, which has been trying to cultivate an image as a global destination for companies working on radio frequency identification technology. However, officials at Wal-Mart and industry experts say the story isn't that simple. They say that RFID was never about just cutting costs but about boosting revenue by making sure that store shelves stay fully stocked.

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Here is just a couple of excerpts from an article by John Gaffney that appeared in 1to1Weekly, T-Mobile, Experian Share Net Promoter Experiences:

It would have been OK if Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix, and everyone else involved with Net Promoter took time to pat themselves on the back at the first annual Net Promoter conference in New York. But no laurels were evident at the conference, and none were rested on. Instead, organizers and panelists answered their own ultimate question -- how is Net Promoter working?

"Creating a customer-centric culture and driving client loyalty is a long-term business strategy, not a quick fix," Laura DeSoto, senior vice president of innovation and synergy at data firm Experian said. "Especially in a B2B environment with complex client relationships, it may take several survey cycles -- a full six to 12 months -- for a client to recognize your headway in delivering an excellent client experience in their survey response. They may not give you 'credit' for your gains until they've seen it consistently over a period of time. At Experian, once we delivered a great client experience consistently, our clients acknowledged this and rewarded us handsomely with a higher Net Promoter score."

Raimund Schmolze, vice president of customer insights at T-Mobile was also candid about his experiences with NetPromoter's limitations. The problems reflected in poor scores are not always simple product or service-related. In Q2 2006 T-Mobile offered a new pricing plan in the EU designed to drive customer acquisition. In the third quarter T-Mobile's NPS dropped. The problem, upon further analysis, was at the call center. New customers coming in from the new pricing model overloaded the call center and led to a downturn in the willingness to recommend.

Dr. Laura Brooks, codeveloper of Net Promoter and vice president of methodology and consulting at conference organizer Satmetrix, explained that discipline is crucial to a successful Net Promoter initiative. The "Net Promoter Discipline" encompasses executive sponsorship within companies, organizational alignment with the executive vision, and system infrastructure for collecting, analyzing, and distributing customer feedback within the organization.

"Our recent research on loyalty best practices has shown a gap between the vision executives articulate for loyalty initiatives and the reality of how successful companies are at driving operational changes and action at the front lines," Brooks said. "Net Promoter offers a solution to this gap, allowing organizations to rally around a powerful and straightforward score that links to customer loyalty and growth. But achieving results requires a disciplined approach that drives customer focus throughout the organization."

If your interested in NPS, be sure to check out our Customer Insight Analysis, which utilizes the NPS methodology as well as Fred Reicheld's book, The Ultimate Question.  Also here's another related post, Execs Confront the Loyalty Gap.   Finally, be sure to review the complete source article for much more on the NPS Conference.

Small businesses have long wrestled with doing payroll on their own. Most avoid outsourcing the work to an outside company, fearing that the cost will nip away at their profits. Indeed, about 64 percent of small employers handle payroll themselves, according to a survey released last year by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, based in Washington. However, experts say it probably pays for small employers to outsource payroll.

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With 8 million customers around the globe ordering business cards, letterhead and other printed materials from its online venue, VistaPrint executives understand the power of Web analytics for uncovering customer trends. Getting the most of out their data was a matter of measuring -- and acting on -- the right metrics.

It took Nick Ruotolo, VistaPrint's vice president of analytics, several months to realize that general site metrics, such as the conversion rate, drop out rates, and average order value, weren't truly actionable. These metrics were merely outcomes, not the means to the outcome. Ruotolo now has a new analytics strategy: measuring the performance of very specific critical site paths.

"We use conversion funnels to track users' step by step success rates as they traverse these paths," he explains. Conversion funnels demonstrate each step of the conversion process, and pinpoint where visitors dropped out of the conversion process. By applying this technique, Ruotolo says he has identified very specific site improvements that have made positive impacts on VistaPrint's bottom line.

Keeping an Eye on the Prize

Focusing on key, actionable metrics led VistaPrint to test a redesigned version of its file upload path that aimed to streamline the process. When the conversion rate didn't change, Ruotolo didn't stop testing. Instead, he continued drilling down into the metrics. He hit the analytics jackpot when he compared the dropout rates of each step of the navigational paths and discovered that the redesigned version had a much higher dropout rate on one of the steps.

"We were then able to focus our attention and subsequently fix that one page of the path, resulting in a significantly higher conversion rate -- about 5 percent -- for the redesigned version," Ruotolo says. "Had we only relied on the high-level conversion rate as a metric, we never would have...

There have been a lot of things to write about this week. The two things that pique my interest, and that I think will have long range implications, are the emerging discussion of customer rights and Salesforce.com's latest announcements of its financial vertical focus. I don't see how the two overlap and I won't try to relate them, but I think they each deserve some analysis. Congress and the airline industry have started making noises about customer rights in the wake of this month's incidents.

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There's no doubt that online banking is widely popular in this country -- just ask the millions of customers who've signed on for the convenience it provides. As fraudsters create new scams to bilk financial services customers or to simply hijack their accounts, however, banking customer trust is on the decline. That customer trust is a powerful thing. Without trust, financial institutions could experience diminishing use of the online channel, which would have a significant impact on the bottom line for many financial institutions.

Salesforce.com officially unveiled its new software for the wealth management industry, confirming rumors that it won a 25,000-seat contract with Merrill Lynch to deploy the application. By itself, the Merrill Lynch deal is a noteworthy event. Increasingly, large firms are incorporating Software as a Service in their operations; however, typical deployments have hovered in the 5,000- to 10,000-seat range. Occasionally, such as in the case with Dell's and Cisco's deployments of Salesforce, those numbers have reached 15,000 subscribers.