【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 ray of consumeradvertising and promotional activities. The enhanced suite, coined Brand Builder, helps the pany plan and evaluates the success of individual activitiesa freestanding coupon inserted into the Sunday papers, for instance and measure the bined effect of a number of integrated activities.The Brand Builder suite prises three related ponents: It includes a statetotheart collaborative tool that lets sales agents, designers, vendors, and retailers plan promotions online. It puts marketing research and information learned about consumers online in real time. And by integrating promotional spending data with scanner and financial information, it provides a powerful analytical tool. In fact, with the new analysis tool, KimberlyClark has moved from relieving a pain point for its retailer customers to making a science of marketing. The pany now knows, for example, that the payback for some consumer promotion programs is twice as high as for others intended to produce the same results. With that kind of information, the firm can identify which elements of marketingcoupon value or creative impact, for instance – result in higher returns.IngersollRandFocusing on pain points can not only be an effective way to build a successful CRM program but can also gets an unsuccessful CRM initiative back on track. That was true for IngersollRand, the$10 billion diversified manufacturer.In 2001, Club Car, the IngersollRand division that makes motorized golf carts, or golf cars as the pany calls them, was showing signs of trouble, with revenues beginning to drift downward as an economic downturn hit the golf industry. But management lacked the information needed to diagnose the reasons for the slowing sales. Individual reps and order managers used their own idiosyncratic processes for dealing with customers. Sales forecasts were made informally using guesswork and rudimentary spread sheets, and the sales force had little influence over product customization.Realizing it needed much better information。 IngersollRand rushed to rollout a broad CRM system that was supposed to incorporate everything from lead evaluation to proposal generation and from product configuration to order entry. But the effort proved too much for the organization to digest. Club Car39。s managers weren39。t convinced of the ultimate benefits. After spending more than $2 million and pleting a first round of user testing, the pany discovered that the system wasn39。t delivering the anticipated productivity gains and reporting capabilities. In fact, the system would dramatically increase the administrative workload of the field sales reps instead of freeing them to spend more time with customers. The unit39。s president had the foresight to halt the effort and made the organization back up and refines its goals. Club Car39。s management team took a fresh look at the key processes in its customer relationship cycle and refocused its CRM initiative on the two deepest pain points: forecasting sales and taking orders.Today, just two years after the CRM effort was relaunched. Club Car has successfully automated its sales operation, significantly improving both customer service and business decision malting. By more directly involving the sales force in the redesign of the system, carefully paring down the data and processes it enpassed, and improving the underlying technology, the pany eliminated many of the CRM system39。s original drawbacks. Sales reps use the new system at customers39。 sites to modify the cars with them, and for the first time, the reps can see the financial implications of different configurations before setting prices and delivery dates. The order information the reps collect is automatically bined with general industry data on golf cart demand and equipment replacement cycles to generate reliable sales forecasts. That, in turn, has led to smoother, more predict able manufacturing schedules.The Customer Relationship CycleA prehensive CRM system can, in theory, automate every aspect of a pany39。s relationship with its customers。 from ail the activities needed to target customers through those for product development, sales, service, and retention. But smart panies sharply focus their CRM implementations, carefully choosing which segment of the cycle, and which functions within that segment, are likely to deliver the greatest return on an initial CRM investment. Success with this first effort often lights the way to subsequent projectsautomating additional functions in the same segment (as KimberlyClark did), steadily moving from segment to segment (as Brother did), or even moving to critical business processes beyond CRM (as Molex did). （二）If the customer relationship management requires prehensive dataPart of the early attraction of CRM systems lay in their ability to deliver real time information t o give marketers, salespeople, and managers a clear picture of what39。s happening in the market at any particular moment. But perfect information es at a high cost. The systems required to collect and disseminate it are expensive。 so are the finely tuned processes needed to react quickly to it. Despite the hype surrounding real time enterprises, the fact is that few panies need perfect information throughout their customer relationship cycles.Why pay for realtime information on business processes that customers don39。t really value or that managers can39。t rapidly adjust? A hotel manager certainly needs realtime data on the availability of rooms but not on the customer39。s opinion of the carpets and drapes. A cable pany needs realtime figures on service outages that demand immediate repairs but not on the profit ability of its payperview programs. Realtime information priorities are driven by realtime business opportunities and must be customized to each individual business. (See the sidebar Calculating the Cost of CRM.)Brother InternationalCompanies need to clearly disting