Humour

Picking your customer’s brain - 2

T A Balasubramanian continues the record of a meeting to boost marketing efficiency at Baffle Corporation.

Bulbul Warrior, the intrepid Sales Manager from Market Blaster Inc, continues her session on the inner workings of the foggy concept called CRM.

She has been invited to Baffle Corporation by Brando Bhatt, the Marketing Head of Baffle, to provide ‘outside perspective’ for Baffle’s struggle to get its customer pitch right. The rest of the gang consists of the CFO, Fin Fina; the HR Head, Gulabi Manpowa; and you, Papyrus Bytewala, the CIO.

“That’s it?” you ask Bulbul sceptically. “Customer Razzle Magnet siphons up all the customer data that we have been lying around and then pops it out on demand?”

“Ah, Pappy, as usual, you simplify what I say so nicely,” coos Bulbul. “But I must correct you a little. We don’t say that you can build a hot partnership purely with some clever strategy to collect every conceivable piece of data from your customers and then use that to cross-sell them something they don’t want. Partnership is a single-thread personal relationship, as opposed to a many-threaded anonymous assault, which is what most companies have in the name of sales.”

“Explain this thread idea to me. It’s getting foggy again here,” grumbles Fin Fina.

“Of course, I will explain it for you Finny,” Bulbul simpers. “When we say single-thread, we mean it as being ‘one with your customer,’ fusing your interests and hers. This is not a re-wording of the tired old concepts like ‘sales and service.’ Instead, it is a paradigm shift, moving away from the old paradigm of transactional customer satisfaction towards the new paradigm of permanent customer loyalty.”

“All this paradigm shifting sounds exciting, but makes no sense to me. I didn’t know we even had our own paradigm here,” says Fin Fina petulantly.

“That’s OK, Finny, I don’t know either,” says Bulbul, smiling sweetly. “I’m just repeating buzzwords from my sales indoctrination programme at Market Blaster.”

“Sorry to interrupt you, Bully. I guess I can call you Bully?” you intercept finally, getting your own back at Bulbul for turning you into Pappy.

You continue talking before Bulbul can respond, “Of course, we believe that our new sales that will come rolling in after the CRM roll-out will even cover the entire costs to implement the whole 1,000-licence CRM thing you offer so generously, hopefully in another five years. We also have a vision that Baffle’s underlying malfunctioning operational processes that do not satisfactorily treat our basic customer activities such as order handling, will somehow be automatically solved when implementing your Customer Razzle Magnet. Am I right, Bully?”

“Mmm, a slight correction. Not automatically. Order-handling is not part of the standard package, but yes we can tweak that in and it would be an extra module, Pappy,” coos Bulbul, tilting her head to one side and looking at you with a tight why-are-you-doing-this-to-me smile.

“Well, that would increase your cost, surely?” says Fina, quick to home in on the financial angle.

“A little, Finny. Just a small hike,” says Bulbul. “About 20 percent, maybe.”

Fin Fina grunts in response, looking at you and Brando, and making a quick note on his pad. This is going to be a long, uphill session for Bulbul and Market Blaster.

“In other words, by slapping on this module,” you say, admiring Bulbul’s selling skills as well as her smile, but determined to wear your CIO hat unflinchingly, “you are promising us that you will straighten out Baffle’s inherently loopy operational practices, and that we will magically have the most effective state-of-the-art CRM application. If you can pull that off, it would be the equivalent of what the magic mask did for Stanley Ipkiss in The Mask.”

“Oh, I loved Jim Carrey playing Ipkiss in The Mask, Pappy. But you must keep in mind that the software is only as good as the data that goes into it. Managing and controlling who uses the CRM on your intranet, and how it is used, become a problem that an astute and clever man like you should be able to manage,” she says, her look indicating that she was not to be trifled with, even though she was oozing charm to carry her sales pitch into the trenches at Baffle.

“Well if the system will work without crashing, we can handle the user interface access rules quite efficiently, Bully,” you say, grandly, finally offering her a straw before she starts calling you by any other baby names.

“Oh yes, I agree, the system will work perfectly, bringing fame, glory and a promotion to the clever guys positioning and running this solution, Pappy,” says Bulbul, literally radiating persuasion.

“Which reminds me,” you say, “Here at Baffle we have another thing we do not like to talk about openly. We will need to modify our data warehouse completely in order to get the necessary data for any CRM system to work properly. But once we have done that, and once we have convinced all our sales troopers to enter the data into the system, plugging in vital statistics like when our customers have their

birthdays, if they play chess or if they have any other hobbies like stamp-collecting or rock-climbing, we will be able to find ways to make those customers loyal, and then maybe we will sell more. The rest of it, all the fame and glory, will come right after.”

“But then, Papyrus, think of the benefits,” protests Brando, who, of course, is now obliged to champion Bulbul’s cause. “With CRM, we will not only know which customer plays chess, but also who are the top 20 percent of those customers, especially the high spenders. Is that right, Bulbul?”

“That’s right, Brandy,” says Bulbul, approvingly. “This knowledge will, of course, come automatically once the system is put in place.”

Brando, perking up visibly under Bulbul’s encouragement, makes a little speech now. “We have clearly noticed that most of our competitors do not seem to have a clue about who their top 20 percent customers are, and neither do we, so far. If we did, we would certainly have been more successful, since 20 percent of our customers bring in 80 percent of our revenues, as Pareto observed in his famous 80-20 Principle. So, with some help from Bulbul and Customer Razzle Magnet, we will be the first to know, and therefore we will be more successful and increase our revenues.”

“Maybe we should hire Pareto?” says Gulabi helpfully.

Fin Fina as usual lets out a massive snort to signal that he has just about heard everything.

(to be continued next week)