Page 136 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

64 INTEGRATE YOUR
DATABASE

Almost all firms keep customer details on computer. The delivery
department keep names and delivery addresses, the accounts
department keep records of addresses for invoices and also keep
records of good and bad payers, the marketing department keep
records of regular customers, salespeople keep records of personal
likes and dislikes of the buyers they see, and so forth. In fact, an
individual customer might feature in several databases within
the same supplier’s systems, with each department keeping the
information it regards as relevant and useful.

Sometimes this is done in the name of confidentiality: a customer’s
payment record might be regarded as something that should be kept
secret from the warehouse staff, for example. More often, though, it
is simple territoriality—people are reluctant to let other departments
in on their special information.

The idea

Carphone Warehouse is one of Britain’s biggest retailers of cellphones
and peripherals. Their customer-facing staff (the people in the stores
and at the end of the telephone) are trained in consultative selling, in
which they find out the customer’s needs and then work out which
of the products on offer would come closest to meeting those needs.
They also needed to troubleshoot customer problems in the event of
a complaint, but they lacked the necessary background knowledge
to do this.

What was needed was an integrated customer relationship
management system. The company installed Trillium software

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