5 Steps For Higher Revenues With Luxury CRM A Guide for Luxury CEOs

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5 Steps For Higher Revenues With Luxury CRM
A Guide for Luxury CEOs
OMNISTREAM
June 2014
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co

4. 2014 Will be a Defining Year for Luxury Brands.
Training and staff retention has always been an issue for luxury
retailers, particularly in emerging markets without a history of
luxury service. With increasing competition and rapidly shifting
consumer expectations, luxury brands will face an uphill battle
creating outstanding customer experiences.
Sales professionals can be the single greatest expense for
retailers, yet their engagement is rarely up to their true
potential. Sales professionals are often trained to nurture long
term customer relationships, yet few are incentivized, or offered
effective tools to help them do so. As a result, frontline sales
professionals often treat customers as transactions, leading to
low customer retention rates and high idle floor time.
Marketing and advertising have received the lion’s share of
luxury budgets over the past years, yet the moment of truth for
a customer is face-to-face. Creating CRM practices that work
for frontline staff should be a top priority for luxury executives in
2014.
OMNISTREAM
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co

5. 1. Mobile CRM. Keep sales people on the sales floor
Luxury brands are often equipped with legacy CRM like Sage
or SAP. These CRMs are great as databases, but lack
extensions required to provide a mobile salesperson with the
workflow to engage customers respectfully and
intelligently outside of the store.
As a result, top sales professionals often opt to keep customer
data in their own blackbooks. They are simply not desktop
workers. It is too costly in time and opportunity cost for them to
leave the floor to enter data into a CRM. As a result many
customers are not being properly serviced, nor do they receive
the 1-to-1 personalized treatment that is synonymous with
luxury. Worst yet, many customers remain hidden from the
brand, with their data disappearing when the employee leaves.
Empower your frontline staff with an outstanding mobile
CRM, designed to simplify relationship building. This will
have a substantial impact on your top line revenue.
OMNISTREAM
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co

6. 2. In an Omnichannel world, multiple sales
professionals (and channels) service top
customers. Assign clear communication boundaries
in your CRM.
One of the biggest complaints from highest spending luxury
consumers (top 5%) is that they receive too many calls and
messages from sales professionals. Simultaneously, slightly
lower spending consumers (5-20% of top spending) feel like
they do not receive enough personal treatment.
This is primarily caused by un-synchronized relationship
tracking. Sales professionals do not know who “owns” a
specific relationship, nor do they know whether a specific
customer has already been contacted recently.
The top 20% of your customers probably bring you 80% of
your revenue. Sales associates should be cultivating a human
relationship with these customers. Empower sales associates
to generate their own messages to these customers, while
maintaining clear boundaries on ownership and frequency. You
will see that open rates soar above 50%, with response rates
and repeat visits increasing accordingly. A well designed luxury
CRM should cater to these requirements.
OMNISTREAM
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co

7. 3. Keep employees engaged. Gamification and
gratitude
CRM is as much about aligning your employees as it is about
aligning your customers. No brand will be able to deliver
outstanding experiences without engaged employees.
Frontline sales professionals often feel isolated from
headquarters, both in terms of decision making process and in
terms of incentives. An effective CRM should not focus solely
on touchpoints entered.
“An engaging CRM should serve as ongoing training,
provide feedback based on key performance metrics, and
provide clear benefits for the sales professional.”
For example, some forward thinking brands have started
offering incentives for professionals to enter data into a CRM.
However, results are not up to expectations because the
software used is outdated and stressful to use. See SILK CRM
extension by Omnistream Co to visualize how gamification
layers can be added on top of traditional CRM software to
increase usage by 200%.
OMNISTREAM
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co

8. 4. Travel Retail is a core part of your CRM strategy
Chinese tourists are notorious for their global shopping
habits. Many of these tourists are both omnichannel, and
omnilocation customers. Brands should ensure that sales
professionals are tracking tourist touchpoints even as they
shop abroad. These relationships should also be assigned
back to their sales professional at home. Forward thinking
brands should also consider compensating home sales
professionals for “assists” made on sales abroad. A full
function CRM should make this compensation structure
easy to implement.
Clear assignment of customer relationships is particularly
important in the luxury watch or diamond sector, where
many Asian tourists travel for purchase. They will require
reminders on maintenance from their home sales
professionals. Note that maintenance satisfaction is one of
the key drivers of customer referrals.
OMNISTREAM
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co

9. 5. Reassign customer relationships when employees
leave
One of the top frustrations among luxury consumers is that
when their favorite sales professionals depart, they often feel
like their relationship with the brand has also been severed.
The reality is that employee churn is high at any luxury brand. It
is essential that customers are immediately reassigned to new
sales professionals when existing employees depart. Top
customers accustomed to personalized service should receive
messages from their new professional, reassuring them that
their relationship is still valued.
These 5 simple but powerful CRM strategies will transform your
organization. Effective CRM is not about technology or the
database. It is about creating solutions that are designed to
enhance the luxury experience. Contact us at Omnistream to
explore how our CRM extension helps luxury brands enhance
their CRM performance.
OMNISTREAM
©2014 OMNISTREAM. All rights reserved.
www.omnistream.co