Any child is different from the public:
Smarterkids.com CRM Policies
Assist parents to praise their children's specificity
introduction
For some companies, customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy. For smarterkids.com, customer relationship management is the business itself. This most user-friendly educational product retailer on this Internet is self
1998
year
11
month
twenty two
day
Since the introduction of the Internet site, we have been committed to understanding their customers, and at the same time, they have always actively develop their customer relationships.
In the past two years, the rapid development of Smarterkids.com is impressive. Usually, there will be more than one million parents, teachers and others who have intended to give children gifts every month. As of the second quarter of 2000, the company has collected 140,000 children's learning character profiles. The total net sales in the first quarter of 2000 increased by more than 1,500% over 1999, and during the holiday in December 1999, the site has nearly 2 million different customers. The rating of Smarterkids.com reflects its achievements, and smarterkids.com As always by the Gomez Adviosors consulting agency as the first place in the education toy site, and in August 2000, the company as a toy "Forbes is the most Welcome company "Verification through Forbes.com (Forbes.com) is included in the" Best Website "directory of the website.
Smarterkids.com successfully returned to the customer's relationship. The following case studies provide information on smarterkids.com and its customer relationship management strategy, their customers' communication points, and database technology used to implement customer relationship management policies. Experience and lessons learned from the implementation of customer relationship management from smarterkids.com will be described in detail.
company background
As the school budget reduction and the increase in the dependence of standardized test results in the education rating decision, parents began to bear more active roles in their child education. It is made from helping their children to learn, improve their test scores, and always maintain the interest of learning, and parents are increasingly purchasing educational books, toys and game programs and software. But in this way, the screening of thousands of educational products will become a daunting task, and the source of trustworthy information is relatively minimal.
The vision of Smarterkids.com is to become the most comprehensive and more human and humanized market that provides information, products, and e-learning services to expand children's education, and can effectively play the leverage of the Internet. Create a real personalized educational experience for the children. Before using the Global Network, personalized education is both expensive and inconvenient, and usually leave the most critical learning issues to children. Even a set of tests, any solution has various problems.
SMARTERKIDS.com was established in April 1994, as a software company producing a disc drive, at the time, the name is Visual Knowledge (visual knowledge). In 1997, the management of Visual Knowledge realized that the Internet will become a strong force in the business sector, and international Internet technology will become an effective way, and create, develop, develop and grow to create parents and teachers. relationship. As of November 1998, Smarterkids.com has a partnership with a Global Network, and has created a global website. It is specially providing educational products and online education services.
At its site, smarterkids.com helps its parents identify and search for target education products by receiving a wide range of personal information about a child. The information is collected by using a complete set of online tools, and then use SmartPickSTM with a wide product database, so that SmartPickSTM is determined by this one-piece algorithm. The most suitable product. Only those products that match the child are presented to users. The company's CEO David Blohm explained: "We have changed the store shelves. If you walk into a store and tell why your child's child's child, and he will press the button and change the aisle and shelf structure, only Your child's product is displayed. This is what we did. "Today, smarterkids.com is a new economic (dot.com) company with 110 employees, located in NEEDHAN in Massachusetts, representing time Select, technology and perfect combination of vision. The company has purchased a variety of products from more than 200 manufacturers including 4,000 products, including books, toys, gaming programs and software. All staff covered salespeople, certified educational experts, as well as IT staff who manage the Global Network Environment, company operators and decision supporters.
Customer relationship management of Smarterkids.com
In the customer-centric environment of SmartTerkids.com, database and customer relationship management is not the driving force for commercial development. Instead, they are the business itself. Customer Relationship Management is related to the business concerned about the customer, and related to the product and the appropriate product with the right customers. Smarterkids.com's way is to rely on personalized e-commerce to build a learning relationship and implement a lifetime customer value. This method is to organize the three central problems: (1) Understanding products; (2) Provide parents to provide a method of determining and transmitting their children; (3) Build and use a more secure database. This method makes smarterkids.com to treat each customer unique characteristics and eventually form customer loyalty to drive it repeated attention, purchase. (see picture 1)
Figure 1: Mode method for smarterkids
Understand product
Smarterkids.com's full-time employee chooses products with educational, develop or learning value. There are more than 300 properties of each product to track define, and stored in a product database called PETLINK (product, education, tracking link). For example, the product is based on how to use this product and whether the product is fun to track, in their Kidslab (Children's Lab), by children to test and comment on the current and future products, when children choose products After the certification education experts evaluate the applicability of these products, its standard should consider the skills of the teaching: the effectiveness of each skill, appropriate level, professor, learning style, and useful occasions (such as sleeping Time, travel, or group game).
Provide parents to determine and deliver their children's needs
The company has developed its proprietary technology, through which parents can create a customization of products for their children. The online tools used by these parents are:
- Early development option list: A investigation of parents in the early childhood (ie born to 6 years old);
- Learning Style Survey: A investigation of a learning style (such as music type, physical strength, or interpersonal) of children's preferences;
- Level level expectation: a step-by-step guidance helps children learn a variety of skills, as well as products that can best conduct professors;
- All state test preparatory center: Provide the actual situation of the state tests in the United States and test help.
100% of the income obtained from the global website is commercial income; and there is no ads, product information and evaluation tools are available free of charge, and they don't need to register.
Build and use a more secure database that is constantly updated
Information about the product is used using SmartPickSTM - a technology that provides a unique product with a person with individuality differences - matching each child's profile. SmartPickSTM is an inference engine that uses the child's profile to classify more than 5,000 entries and give suits by 75 optional products, which can best meet the needs of the child's education. This matching and recommended process is present in the personalized area of the store called My Kids (my child) on the global website. Evelyn Somers, senior vice president of Marketing Department, said: "We have more than 300 sold points of our products. Once we understand customers, we can make full use of all of these selling points."
Contact customers
With Smarterkids.com implements its business, the company contacts customers through three main methods: Customer Service Center, Email and Website. Each contact method has made a sudden contribution to the success of Smarterkids.com.
customer service center
Smarterkids.com communicates with its customers with their customers and provides a contributory customer service. The service agent is supported by the certification education expert team, and these experts will answer specific issues on the age and education level. In the Customer Service Center, customers can contact: email, on-site conversation, or call. For example, Cisco's customer exchange equipment provides a wide variety of customer service projects and monitors its effects. SMARTERKIDS.com began to implement this Cisco product in October 1999 and began to use in November of the same year.
Many customers choose to communicate with emails, which is the most cost-effective service mechanism for smarterkids.com. First, the service agent replies 50 to 80 emails a day, but now it is passed every day? ? The help of keys can complete more than 400 emails, which charges emails and makes information analysis. Based on a rule engine, it sends the message to the right person according to the implied reaction template. When appropriate, these messages can be sent outside the call center, even outside the institution. For example, if a customer has questions about a specific Fisher Price toy, the message is transferred to the FISHER Price Customer Service. Since Cisco Software is a small customer service technology, a gorgan browser can be adopted, email rules can be created by using a simple global network, so that the programming is eliminating.
Customers can also choose to use the text-based communication or live sound communication to talk to the service agent. Text Communication is another low-cost communication form, and its use is still extension. For live sound customers, you can request a return visit or through the International Internet Protocol, direct conversation with a proxy, through this technology, representative and customers can talk to each other while watching the same web page.
Currently, smarterkids.com uses information obtained from customer service exchange to improve its operation. When the service agent confirms that some questions are encountered by the customer, the common problem answers will be updated, and the website will also change, and the customer service database also supports email exchange projects. For example, Smarterkids.com will send a satisfactory survey to a satisfactory survey to send a product from the product to the product from the product in the last 30 days. Smarterkids.com has established Kidslink to enter data and collect information during a table during customer service communication; this information is part of the customer profile.
Smarterkids.com's customer service has won high evaluation from the International Internet Rating Company. The BizRate rating agency gave the company's four-star evaluation on customers, and Gomez.com listed the site as the second place in customer trust. Future customer services include better integration of information on customer yields. e-mail
Email is the main contact method of Smarterkids.com and the existing and potential customers, and this way has driven the largest share of current online shopping. The company sends up to 20 million email information each month, giving those people who are usually in demographic with Smarterkids.com shoppers. "You will get a response in a few minutes. Within one day, you will understand if the list is useful." Blohm said.
Email is divided into three basic categories: service type, sales type and relational. Service-type email processing related to customer service, such as problem processing, order, and sales return, etc. Sales email is a largest type, including reward postcards and newsletters, and new product supply and website directory information. Relational email categories include trial to establish trust and loyalty - these emails are not used for promotional publicity or product sales. An example is a letter from the president of Smarterkids.com, announced the characteristics and functions of the new website, providing gifts to obtain customers. As Somers said: "Relational email is equally important to sales email, don't always try to sell products." This is critical to developing customer loyalty.
Email is generated inside the home page (ASP) such as Responsys. First, marketing users use a set to launch this event for all the previous tools, secondly, develop the most likely potential customers list, and perform dynamic tracking of specific customers, so that parents can receive a child Careful study of specific needs, fine-crafted emails. Email is usually limited to weekly, although it will be sent more frequently during important sales period. In the most concerned groups recently, most customers show that they can receive more smarterkids.com's email when they are inappropriate. Using information obtained from Responsys, email also receives monitoring, which provides a real-time window for clicking traffic data and customer reactions - who is clicking, where, and so on.
website
A customer is most abundant in smarterkids.com is probably to access its website. Smartkids.com believes that personalized services will drive customers loyalty, and recent financial data is just this. About 30% of customers have already constituted a personalized mall, and these customers have more frequent shopping, and each visit is more consumed. In essence, in SMARTERKIDS, customers who have mastered the basic situation are 150% -200% higher than the typical international Internet shoppers.
The personalization of the website is driven by several ways. The most basic is to show different homepages for different visits. This depends on the identity of the visitor and whether it is understanding the site. The content seen by visitors visited by the first visit is driven by the inferior classification of information contributing to the information of the population statistics and psychology, which is obtained from the customer entering the style of the website and the relevant information of the trend. For those previously purchased or visualists, the contents of the homepage depends on the corresponding information, such as the customer information input, goals and needs that match the characteristics of the product.
For the first or accidental visitor, the website's products and characteristics are organized, and most parents think about their children - grade and age - toddler baby, preschool children, 1-3 grade , 4 -6 grades and 7-9 grades. Each annual range corresponds to a "channel" on the website, and the visitor can browse the links organized by parents or teachers' preferences, primary requirements, brands, keywords, or the subject of the subject from this channel. Each channel also has pictures and prices of its strongly recommended products, these products have the company's expert employees to the corresponding links of their evaluation. For customers who have provided complete children, Smarterkids.com uses SmartPickSTM to direct the target product. For subsequent visitors, the website confirms the registered member number and demonstrates the product and service prepared to the child, Figure 2 depicts this procedure.
enter:
SmartPickSTM
Match
Reorganize
Shelf
Output:
Unique data collection point
Recommended product
For its proprietary skill test
Learning style survey
Standardized test results
Specific learning goals
Unique product performance
Larger purchase possibility
More successful learning experience
Strengthen parental role
Figure 2: SmartPickSTM matching program
Smarterkids' homepage changes up to 8 detail scenarios to adapt to changes in customer interest measurements. After a rigorous and fast development procedure including marketing, sales planning and product management team, it has become very intuitive and easy to get started. The changes in the website are also capable of actually affecting action. For example, at some point, a marketing survey indicates that less than 50% of customers aware of the characteristics of stores called MY Kid's. The homepage will re-adjust the degree of understanding of this feature, and the result of this adjustment is 25% from its homepage, and the number of visitors in my Kid's store has increased by 121%, and the child's registration rate is improved. 130%.
Smarterkids mainly uses Microsoft's technology, including Microsoft Site Serves Commercial Edition to handle its web server and business engine, and add NetAtaAlysis, which is a data analysis software from Net Genesis, SAD. Customer behavior (see the IT construction drawing of Figure 3).
Smarterkids database
Listen to the relevant database information when you listen to the feedback of the IT community.
Data originating from contact requirements.
Data from other systems like Great Plains.
Data extraction program
Access database data
Data discovery
NetAnaLysis maintains the source of clicking and recommended customers and discovering online activities to conduct customer behavior analysis. According to the company's vice president, Al Noyes: "NetAnaLysis summarizes reports, people are easy to understand, and have customer reports, which can analyze the reasons for trading model and in-depth situation behind it. We can track people in our website Progress, including where they click, where are you staying, and on which page exits it. These valuable information resources provide us with a complete understanding of our website and electronic customers. "
An example is that smarterkids.com finds most of the visitor from Microsoft's Electronic Encyclopedia homepage to the company's website, and leave after a brief stay on the site. The company found that these visitors were from search tools bundled with slogan advertising with the encyclopedia, and analysis showed that when people search for some best-selling toys like Banbie or Pokemon, they got it when they logged in to smarertkids. "Did not find Such goods ". The company has adjusted its website to showcase these items to any visitors who come to the website from the encyclopedia. The result is a very significant improvement. Specifically, SK has been installed from Net Analysis has been installed. The ratio of the order is twice. Figure 3: IT Construction Lamp
among them:
Web Personalization website personalized: 22 Kangbai ProLiant 6400 turn Erong Sanxi4 channel website server Windows2000 Microsoft Website Server 3 Commercial Edition Akamai SmartPickstm Netanalysis
Email Campaigns Email: Responsys ASP
Customer Service Customer Service: A Suitable Cisco Customer Interactive Equipment Kidslink
Operational Systems Great Plains Accounting System Logility Database PetLink
Data Analysis Quadstone Excel
The Data Hub Order, Product, Global Website Dynamics, Service, Promotion, Child Overview, Email Microsoft SQL Server7 Eight billion bytes
Smarertkids analyzes the information obtained by NetAtaLysis in Excel's electronic data sheet. A market survey analyst extracts data from NetAtaLysis in each business area, and integrates information obtained from other sources (such as Great Plains) to generate data for business users if necessary.
There is a limitations that click on the link between the next order. In the first quarter of 2001, smarterkids.com added data development software from Quadstone to existing composite tools. This system will connect to the order data with the order data, which is about a panoramic description of the customer - their identity, what they are doing, as well as the result of the order. Another improvement in Quadstone is more simple in the user interface. Business users have trained in Quadstone and try to form a more direct interactive relationship with the software in processing daily information needs, which will release market survey analysts to deal with advanced analysis and special programs.
Confidentiality and security
Smarterkids.com is one of the critical aspects of its IT departments and business strategies. Somers believe that if the customer knows how they will benefit, they will let the company share their personal data, and she also recommends those companies to give customers a variety of options to provide them with relevant content, and give them a special treatment for them. " She explained: "Unless I can give a reasonable reason, I will not have any request." Table 1 provides the amount of data obtained by Smarterkids and its customers.
Table 1: Data acquisition table
data collection
Smarterkids
How to use data
Benefits enjoyable
· Final delivery address or
Address list
· Other delivery address
· Check the table before filling the form
· Remember to choose delivery address
To send gifts to
· Convenient
· Name, electronic fuel tank,
Password
· Confirm for return visit
· Link to personal profile information such as
Set historical record and corresponding tracking
· Safety and confidentiality
· Credit card account
· Payment express delivery fee
· save time
· Special interest and preferences
· Newsletter to customers
· Provide new to the new to product interests
· Carefully prepared promotional activities and
Special product
· Create a more user-friendly
Shopping experience
· Only those that they want to send to them
· Easy to shop
Successful measure
Smarterkids.com provides a personalized market for information, product and e-learning services to enhance children's education experience, but it has to take profits after all, in order to improve investment yield (ROI). Smarterkids.com is trying to explore all aspects of all aspects of the three basic customer contacts. What is meaningful. Its goal is to use extended measurement methods and test pathways to increase sales. These objective measurements have: every time, the cost of each marketing activity, the cost of each slogan advertising, and the cost of the current event decide the cost, And the differences in the relatives of the new customers relatively turned back.
It is very important to the measures of the click, but the more critical is to do on the website, what to do, what clicks are finally connected to the order? What kind of promotions, advertisements and activities not only encourage website visits, but also encourage visitors to reside and purchase? Which websites promote shoppers to come back again? These coping models have just begun, and their processes are delayed in a certain extent due to data quality problems. This type of quality problem is a kind of method of smarterkids assigned to a certain customer identity. Currently, a customer can get five different authentication codes. A differential verification code is caused by the difference between "cookied" access to relatively non-"cookied" access. In addition, the identity verification code can be allocated based on an inducible website or a URL typing based on someone. Finally, the authentication code can also assume a child profile to assume a child profile and the visitor actually purchased the product.
The comprehensive measure of quantity and quality is to track the effectiveness of the website and marketing activities, see Figure 4.
Learned lesson
SMARTERKIDS has learned a lot of lessons during the two years of developing their customer relationships on the Global Online. In this section, we will list the most important lessons learned by the company.
Feature evaluation
Features: All state test preparatory center
Send date:
2000
In August
Month 28
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Evaluation date:
2000
In August
Month 28
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to
2000
Year 10
Month
day
This feature exists on the home page:
2000
In August
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Email promotion:
Quantity measure: three weeks two weeks a week
page settings:
#Indler page number:
% Homepiped Quantity:
#page settings:
%page settings:
% Enters this page:
% Exit this page:
# Differential visitor:
% Differential Accessor:
#Views:
duration:
Website visitor leaving rate:
# 概 概:
Quality measure:
The vitality of the BizRate rating:
News impact:
Analyst response:
Email feedback:
User survey:
Figure 4: Effect of measurement activities
Customer relationship management is not easy. According to Somers, "customer relationship management has a lot of wonderful prospects, but there are many hard work to make it work." This usually means that business users must participate in the technical aspects of this project. "I am a marketing personnel, and I have to be taken by these broken noses every day." CEO suggests the use of elastic database design, so "will not bind your hands and feet in the future."
Don't wait until you fully grasp the activities of customer relationship management, such as 1: 1 email. Smarterkids recommends that companies don't fear the happening due to the pursuit of perfect ideas. If you wait until your customer relationship management plan is completely mature, you will never take off. In contrast, the company should jump down, then learn, and pass the time to improve improvement. The charm of the Internet is that technology can be improved in real time, so if we fail to achieve the expected effect, we can immediately push down. Smarterkids can predict the day sales status through 10 amplitude (AM). Understand the effectiveness of marketing activities in a few minutes, and can be adjusted to a promotional event almost the same. How to use email carefully. Companies must be able to deliver messages to customers, otherwise people will eventually leave from their websites. The message should be clear and simple to explain it to provide the content of the product, and the content of the content is a bulletproof to reduce the customer calling for those who have questions. The message sent by Smarterkids is timely and targeted, such as event reminders, the final deadline for specials, and the end of the promotional product activity. They found that the time-effective limit is very effective, and it is also very frank.
Website speed is critical in the new economy. The more you do it, the more you need to strengthen the database, however, the interaction with the database can really slow down a website. Somers explained: "The speed of the website is being consumed by each personalized effort." Smarterkids.com uses the dynamic server home page to generate content for its network users. In order to accelerate the performance of dynamic server technology, the company has created its own software, which turns into a dynamic server and converts it into hypertext labeling language (HTML) so that it can quickly upload and display on the user's personal computer.
Don't be a little for some small, marketing campays (even those effective opportunities). A 50% of the customer's transformation rate is quite good. But if only ten people in general target customers are converted into actual customers through activities, you will not see the minimum results. Smarterkids.com is survived according to the 80/20 law and focusing on the maximum possible number of people who are profitable. Use data excavation and personal profile to try to seek your best customers.
Don't forget that you are a store, and the store is selling goods. It is easy to be overchatrifted in development relationships and delivery content; however, the task of retailer with the new economy (Dotcom) is to sell products and services. In Smarterkids.com, this is always ranked in front of other motives. Their rumors are: Never play a thriveful shopper. Weavigate the catalog and business on the website. The product catalog attracted customers, while business brought income.
in conclusion
The customer relationship management on the Internet is not using a cool technology. It uses an unique way to use international Internet to create differences, and smarterkids.com is just doing this. The online sales of the fourth quarter (busy holiday period) in the fourth quarter of 1999 increased by 195 times, reaching $ 4.3 million, 1999 annual sales equivalent to 245 times in 1998, reaching $ 5.4 million .
According to Gomez's analyst Liz Leonard, there is no retailer's personal online sales experience like smarterkids.com without a retailer. Forrester Powerrankings rating agencies think Smarterkids.com is the "most easy to get started" toy / game software website, and they are leading geese in business rating satisfaction.
Their philosophy is simple and concentrated:
- Find your best customers
- Love them
- Let them love you
