CRM - June 2008 - (Page S2)

2 June 2008 Sponsored Content CRM magazine Best Practices Series: CRM & eCommerce CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND E-COMMERCE—could there be a more natural combination? In many ways, e-commerce applications, such as the online storefront, are great examples of CRM theory put into practice. Your storefront is like a laboratory, with the aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics all there to be adjusted, without the unknown variable of employee quality to contaminate the results. There may be no definitive beginning to the e-commerce era, but for the sake of argument let’s say that it all began when Amazon.com started selling way back in 1995. Never mind that it took almost eight years for the online retailer to turn a profit in all four quarters of the same year—e-commerce’s time had come, and executives from every type of organization, in every kind of industry, were forced into good, old-fashioned on-the-job training. While the brick-and-mortar or catalog model of retailing provides some of the basic framework for “e-tailing”—its online counterpart—not all things retail translate easily to the e-commerce model. For one thing, those pesky shopping carts seemed to be abandoned at extremely high rates. Hardly a surprise: If consumers don’t have to invest any time traveling to their local shopping malls, why shouldn’t they just leave items unordered in an online cart and surf off to the another site, looking for better selection or price? For e-tailers, the downside of impulsive purchasing is impulsive shopping-cart abandonment. E-commerce is also fraught with other problems unique to the online experience: secure payment, shipping, viable customer service, returns, instantaneous price comparisons, and now the reemerging threat of state-by-state taxation. But there are upsides, as well. The technology provides the ingredients for perpetually efficient, automated, commercial activity—24 hours a day, every day of the week—and e-commerce managers now have access to a mass of customer data and virtually unlimited quantitative analysis. The e-commerce channel is business in a microcosm, stripped down to the basics. You drive potential customers to your site—through search, email, affiliate programs, other demand-generation activities—and track visitors as they jump from page to page, responding to offers and upsells. A welldesigned site has a distinct look and feel, allows shoppers to easily navigate, and provides a payment process that’s smooth and flexible. Ultimately, customers choose to buy or not to buy—but that doesn’t have to be the limit of the e-commerce interaction. Maybe they had a question or a problem that was dealt with professionally and efficiently, or maybe a new customer chose to bookmark your site or opt into your email list. If your e-commerce channel manages not only to win customers but to also generate repeat customers, then you have managed to add value to the transaction beyond simple economics. Creating strong relationships with customers online—and, ideally, expanding those relationships to include offline customer interactions—presents special challenges, but new technologies are making it possible. In the following essays, five leading vendors offer their insights on how to maximize your online channel. Bob Fernekees GROUP PUBLISHER CRM Media, LLC a division of Information Today, Inc. http://Amazon.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - June 2008

CRM - June 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Making Mashup Masterpieces Trouble in the Air CRM on Twitter Is SaaS Ready for Its Contact Center Close-up? CRM: In the Public Interest Required Reading Lollipop Loyalty Best Practices Series: CRM & eCommerce eGain NetSuite Infor Longwood Software Vovici The Second Coming of 2.0 Believe the Hype About Hosted Contact Centers All Talk So Hot It’s Cool Linksys Gets Shaken, a Community Is Stirred The Risky Risk Business Awana Hears a SaaS Sermon Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - June 2008

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