Tokyo Dreaming 16: tastes
like chicken
Apr 02, 2001 03:02 PDT So I'm in a yakitori restaurant discussing CRM with an
octet of agency people from Europe and Japan. (Yakitori is one of the 20 or
so species of japanese food, and at its core is chicken.)
CRM - Customer Relationship Management - takes a principle known to shopkeepers
since biblical times and applies it to the Fortune 1000. Broadly: remember your
customers' names, and they're more likely to buy from you again.
(The first course arrives as we talk. Plain cubes of chicken on skewers.
Hot, honest, and a staple of Tokyo street food; dinner begins with the basics.
The meat hisses as I bite into it.)
Now the trouble with the shopkeeper principle is that it doesn't scale
well. Old Mr Akiba may know his hundred or so customers by name, but triple
that and he's got problems. Customer Relationship Management lets him fake it.
At the core of CRM is a plain list of names, thousands of them, all those who
buy from you arranged in neat rows.
(The next course turns up. More cubes of chicken, but delineated on the
skewers by blocks of onion and green pepper, putting the plainness of the chicken
in context.)
Our shopkeeper Akiba leaves lots of space in the margins of his list,
because he wants to do more than just remember their names: he wants to know
what they buy. Whenever someone visits his store, he notes what they bought
next to their name. His list grows into a spreadsheet, a landscape of information
recording his sales in smooth columns.
(The third course is chicken soup. It's a smooth blend of texture and
flavour, no surprises, familiar and nutritious. But the skewer paradigm breaks
down at this point: you need more than a stick for soup, so it's served in a
tall cup.)
Let's say business is good, and Mr Akiba opens a second store. But some
customers shop at both stores. While Akiba can't be in two places at once, his
spreadsheet of customers and their visits can be: he puts it on the Internet,
where his son, who runs the second store, can see it. Mrs Tanaka bought fifty
kilos of rice from the first shop just two days ago; Akiba junior realises she's
no hot prospect for another sack.
(We're getting into the guts of the dinner now. Chicken livers, rich in
minerals and vitamins. The function of a liver is to merge and purge, collect
and expel proteins your body can't use, just as Akiba and his son avoid duplication
by sharing a single spreadsheet.)
The real strength of CRM is that it lets you sell more. Akiba & Son
get together each Friday and go over the spreadsheet, going over what-if scenarios
in their heads. Your best prospect for a sale is someone you've sold to before.
Customers who like chicken drumsticks are prospects for chicken wings. Customers
who like both are just asking to be sold hot sauces and cold Kirin beer. This,
in fact, is the essence of chicken, oops, of CRM. Cross-sell. Up-sell. Make
more money. Akiba's spreadsheet becomes a database, bursting with possibilities
and opportunities.
(The next course, by the way, is chicken wings. Everyone's on the fourth
or fifth beer thanks to the salty sauce each course is cooked in. Beer goes
down great with chicken.)
There's one more thing CRM promises: the ability to sift and sort the
mass of information as it grows, to tease out patterns and insights from its
ebb and flow. Sometimes the insights are startling. But this part of CRM is
young, and often it just comes up with things that seem like a good idea logically,
but which are totally unworkable in the real world. That's why, for all the
cool CRM software on the market, it still takes human beings to get real value
from it.
We're talking about the importance of this role as the final course arrives.
It's sushi, pale glistening fragments of flesh on rice. Only the flesh isn't
fish.
Don't tell me that's raw chicken sushi. Please.