Realizing the need to understand and respond to customer behavior, PostNet recently initiated a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy with the ultimate goal of motivating customers to purchase more. PostNet is an international postal and business service franchise corporation with 850 locations worldwide, including 400 in the U.S.
“We want to understand what other products and services would interest our customers and encourage them to shop with us more,” says Leslie Goldman, Creative Director at PostNet International. To help create and implement a CRM strategy, PostNet is partnering with Epicor Software Corporation.
PostNet’s CRM project began with a full-fledged analysis of existing customer data. “We have a powerful POS system that allows us to collect customer information, but we weren’t managing and analyzing that information,” Goldman explains. “We had done focus groups and customer surveys to find out which customers were loyal,” she continues, “but we didn’t know what else we could do for them.”
Getting Buy-In From Store Owners
In order to productively collect and manage customer information, store owners must be on board. “Getting adoption from store owners is vitally important” in the effort to be able to understand and respond to customer behavior, says Goldman. “The key is to get the people working the registers to value and understand why we are asking for customer information.”
Because individual store owners are busy with day-to-day store operations, they haven’t spent the time to implement CRM. “We knew that we needed to help our franchisees,” Goldman notes.
Once the store owners are on board and the data analysis component is up and running smoothly, then PostNet plans to launch a franchise-wide loyalty program. “We plan to use the rest of 2009 to establish best practices for collecting data, then we will likely implement the loyalty program at the beginning of 2010,” says Goldman.
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After the initial implementation phase, PostNet could take advantage of Epicor’s full complement of CRM services including:
- CRM Maintenance – regular data cleansing, plus quarterly change-of-address adjustment
- Campaign Management – creating target lists, post-promotion reporting, segmentation strategies
- Loyalty Program Management – data entry, redemption reports, coordination of reward fulfillment
- Cross-Channel Campaign Management
Other retailers currently leveraging Epicor’s CRM services include Bikini Village, Carter’s, Foot Locker, Kellwood Retail Group, Specialty Fashion Group, and Tommy Bahama.
