CHICAGO — Harry Rosen is going one-on-one with 200,000 customers.
Intent on amping up the breadth, depth and quality of its relationships with shoppers, the upscale men’s wear retailer pairs wireless technology and customer relationship management, or CRM, software to nurture bonds that were far easier to build 53 years ago, when founder Harry Rosen knew almost everyone who stopped by his 500-square-foot shop in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighborhood.
Today, with 16 Canada stores, 700 employees and $200 million in sales, developing personal relationships with hundreds of thousands of customers is a tall order. However, it’s doable with the right tools, said Larry Rosen, chairman and chief executive officer. “Can I personally develop them? No. As ceo of the company? No,” he said. “But our people can.
“The secret of using technology and CRM is, you have a system that can store information on everybody — what they purchased, personal facts — all in compliance with various privacy legislation, secure,” he said. “It allows you to extend those very strong, natural relationships that you may have had with your top 10 or 15 customers to a much larger group.”
Harry Rosen’s chief information officer, Stephen Jackson, outlined the program last week at the National Retail Federation’s advertising conference here. “Our whole business is based on one-to-one relationships,” he said in an interview. Before implementing the solution last year, “We were missing [opportunities] by not making information available to associates when they needed it.”
Now, armed with a wireless, personal digital assistant, or PDA, computers from Hewlett-Packard, sales associates can access the Web-based Sage Software CRM system and the PCMS point-of-sale database to view information about a particular shopper such as size, designer preferences, past purchases and personal details about family, career or his last golf junket.
Having this information at their fingertips, rather than abandoning a shopper to look it up on a backroom computer or black book, enhances the shopping experience and builds trust, said Rosen. While all sales associates can access basic information on any shopper, only the primary employee assigned to each customer can view the more personal information.
“Before you know it,” Rosen added, “Bob Jones is thinking about you not as somebody who served him last time, but somebody who has an intimate interest in doing a quality job for him: ‘I am no longer a number.'”
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The PDAs have cameras and additional features. Sales associates can check inventory at other stores to locate that must-have item for a shopper, send and receive e-mail and make phone calls to alert a Hugo Boss or Ermenegildo Zegna loyalist to an upcoming trunk show. Because all activity goes through the CRM system, Harry Rosen can monitor the frequency with which associates are contacting clients so they are neither neglected or pestered. Sales managers can track their store performance on the PDAs by viewing actual, targeted and previous year’s sales reports.
Harry Rosen’s next step is only in the discussion stages: how to automatically recognize that a valued customer has entered the store. With this capability, a sales associate away on lunch break could be alerted to return because his top client just arrived. One idea involves Bluetooth technology, the short-range wireless communications protocol on many shoppers’ cell phones and PDAs. Shoppers who choose to opt in to such a program could provide Harry Rosen their unique Bluetooth identification number, be recognized upon arrival and be assured of the premium service they expect.