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In-Depth Information
can be effective in reducing the costs while also providing the complete functional coverage
demanded by the customers.
1.2.5.3 360-Degree View of Customer
In the customer-centric approach, the goal is to provide personal service—recreating the indi-
vidual attention, flexibility, and understanding that the best neighborhood stores have always
provided to their most valued customers—on a mass scale. Meeting this goal involves solving the
many-to-many
problem, that is, many people within different departments of the enterprise inter-
acting with many different customers. None of the information on interactions is shared across
these different departments, leaving all employees involved with only partial information. Each
employee has at the most only a fragmentary view of the customer resulting in possibly below-
par service, inappropriate product offering and pricing, and ineffective branding. To address this
effectively and inefficiently, each of the company's representatives who interacts with the customer
needs to have a clear and complete picture of that customer's activity. This holistic picture is what
is termed as the
360-degree view
.
Achieving a 360-degree View of the customer is critical to
◾
Interact with a customer in a fully informed way
◾
Assess the customer's potential value correctly
◾
Determine the programs that could realize this potential value from each customer
The key is to integrate in a single environment the related data that come from all points of inter-
action with the customer. This can be achieved effectively by a CRM system like SAP CRM (see
Chapter 2 “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems”) that will give each employee
at each customer touch point a
360-degree view of Customer
. SAP NetWeaver, which is a critical
enabler of enterprise-wide integration of diverse applications across various products and divisions,
affords the enterprise a 360-degree view of its customer relationships across multiple channels of
interaction. It enables every customer to perceive the enterprise as a whole and also expect to be
recognized and valued by the enterprise as a whole. By tracking and managing interactions with
individual customers and making the customer history available across the enterprise, such a sys-
tem provides companies with the data they need to improve relationship across the board.
1.2.5.4 One-to-One Marketing
In traditional mass marketing approach, companies use demographic segments—segments based
on standard demographic measures, like age, income, geography, gender, and marital status—to
divide up their customer base and define marketing program. While this is a step in the direc-
tion of recognizing the fact that not all customers are the same, this does not address the problem
adequately. The problem is that demographic segments tend to be very large or coarsely grained
because of which major differences among individual members of such segments, and the corre-
sponding marketing opportunities, are overlooked. This is also the primary reason that standard
response rates for direct marketing, such as direct mail, are only about 2%.
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers introduced the notion of one-to-one marketing in their hit
topic,
he One to One Future
(1997). This advocates the move toward more fine-grained segments,
with the ultimate goal of reaching the segment of
one
. One-to-one marketing treats each customer
as an individual, based on a holistic view, with consistent actions across all touch points and to
think in terms of wallet share of each customer rather than that of market share.
