Kolkata: : 

Samsung India Electronics Ltd is planning to reinforce its

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives. The company
has embarked on a new promotion campaign for select products,
beginning August 2003, aimed at upgrading its customer base and
inducing new buying.

Under the scheme of things, Samsung has decided to insert a Product

Registration Card (PRC) with products across select categories in its
IT/ telecom, consumer electronics and home appliances divisions. The
company will then derive relevant data from the PRCs in terms of its
existing customer profile and communicate with its target audience in
a specific manner to induce them to upgrade to other Samsung
products. Samsung, as of now, has a customer base of about 40 lakh
in India.

According to a Samsung spokesperson, “Through the data derived

from the PRC, we will be able to determine the customer’s intention
to purchase other products and carry out more targeted product and
marketing communication with the relevant target groups to reach out
to our customers more proactively.”

The new CRM initiative will be in addition to the ‘Voice of

Customer’ programme that the company is currently conducting
across the country.

“To check how satisfied our customers are, we have authorised an

agency to call up existing customers from our databank. In case they
are dissatisfied on any account or have any pending complaint, we
address it within a stipulated time frame. Around 7,000 customers are
called per month as part of our VOC Programme,” the spokesperson
said.

The company’s other CRM initiatives include organising free service

camps every year for all its products on an all-India basis. Samsung
claims that its fortnight-long service camp in 2003 addressed the
needs of 63,000 customers across the consumer electronics, home
appliances and IT/telecom products. The company has been operating
the camps for the last four years.
Samsung has been setting up call centres and has taken its customer
club online. It has also put in place a B2C e-commerce application
called samsungemart.com which helps the company run online
marketing activities through its customer database. The company uses
the database for various promotional activities and direct mailer
marketing apart from understanding customer behaviour to build up
effective CRM activities.

Peter Weedfald is fanatical about customers. Weedfald,

vice president, strategic marketing and new media,
North America operations for Samsung Electronics
America Inc., wants to grip each customer in an
unrelenting bear hug of unparalleled service. 

This fanaticism toward the customer has led Weedfald

to redefine CRM. "CRM does not stand for customer
relationship management--yet. Not yet. Because first
you have to put the process and business desire in front
of it," he says. "CRM first stands for customers really
matter. And that philosophy must be present throughout
an organization, from the receptionist all the way up
through the [CEO]."
At Samsung it is. Samsung's CRM mantra can be
summed up in 11 words: Every form of customer
interaction and every touch point is CRM. Weedfald is
the person who chants that mantra for Samsung in
North America, driving it deep into the soul of the
company. The philosophy is so pervasive, in fact, that
any employee will give virtually the same response
when asked what CRM means to the $32 billion global
electronics firm. 

"Every person, every product, and every advertisement

is a customer touch point," says Enjin Kang, senior
CRM manager for Samsung's North America
operations. "We evaluate everything we do by what
customers want."

And this philosophy is more than just business. It is

personal. "My personal philosophy is, customers really
matter," Weedfald says. If that sounds repetitive, it may
be because Weedfald has spent his career focusing on
customers. While working as a publisher at Ziff Davis
Media Inc., for example, Weedfald made 15 face-to-
face sales calls per week. On average most publishers
visit three clients per week. His dedication to "beating
the streets" earned him the nickname The Hammer. 
Today Weedfald is focusing that passion on Samsung
customers. He oversees marketing, advertising, CRM,
PRM, research, the information center, B-to-B and B-
to-C commerce, and business strategies for five
divisions: consumer electronics, information
technology, telecom, semiconductor, and home
appliances. Since joining the company last October, the
47-year-old sales and marketing veteran has introduced
a series of initiatives designed to strengthen Samsung's
relationships with its customers. There are five CRM
staffers who report to him: a senior CRM manager, who
oversees the strategic development and deployment of the CRM
infrastructure; an insight manager, who aggregates and reports on data collected
in the CRM system; a campaign manager, who creates all new-media programs
(including banners and splash pages) and the HTML codes for them; a senior
manager of Internet promotions, who oversees all online promotions, including
those on Samsung's Web site; and the manager of the knowledge management
center, who is building the infrastructure of the center and ensuring that its data
is in viable formats. 

Weedfald says he is confident that their efforts thus far are unique in the
electronics industry. "I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say there is not
one competitor that has the CRM program we have," he says.

Do Touch
That program is built on touch points--and on a mass of research on the market,
on CRM, and on company objectives that Weedfald has gathered.

"Touch points are all about customers really matter," Weedfald says. "If a
company really cares about its customers it will use service as a touch point.
The receptionist is a touch point. The sales force is a touch point. Banner ads
and magazines, TV, and cinema ads are touch points. The box is a touch point.
What is inside the box is a touch point."

The number one use for CRM in Samsung North America is to keep close ties
with current customers. To do this Weedfald's team has focused its initial efforts
on data collection and analysis using such touch points as banner ads, trade
shows, customer service, and in-store research to gather information. "Samsung
has done incredible as a company. To get to the next level we have to build
products that consumers want, and fix problems that consumers want fixed,"
Weedfald says. "And the only way to do that is to build a CRM system."

Creating a consumer data collection mechanism has been the principal task over
the past year for Insight Manager Peter Goodnough. His goals are to make sure
that Samsung is getting the most valuable information from each of its
preexisting touch points and that the information gets centralized in the system.
"This is a capability that didn't exist at all at Samsung before the CRM
implementation," he says.

Samsung is now also ensuring that all the information it gets from its retail
touch points is codified and centralized in the same way as the consumer data.
"We're working on getting day-to-day, check-the-pulse field reports on retailers
and consumers, and we're turning it into a 24-hour turnaround where we can
inform the point-of-sale tomorrow on information we gather today," Goodnough
says.

Samsung plans to use the data to create a competitive advantage. Using the SAP
3.0 and Allegis systems on which its CRM, PRM, and knowledge management
operates, the CRM team can customize information for its retail partners by
product, zip code, by what Samsung and its competitors were doing the past
week or month regarding price points, rebates, and such. "If we wanted to we
could show them their competition without telling them the names," says
Weedfald, who has fully embraced the systems although they were in place
before he joined Samsung. "We could say, 'Here is what three of your
competitors are doing on the shelf that you're not doing.' That gives our
salespeople one more reason to make a sales call, and builds competitive
advantage by giving the retailers data they may not be collecting themselves." 
Another tactic is to provide the data to product managers to help them select
marketing strategies and price points. By testing price points, for example,
Samsung can learn whether a $20-off customer incentive affects sales volume,
and if not, save some margin by not running the discount.

Samsung's centralized database and the segmentation of its customers within

that database could give the company a competitive advantage as well. "I have a
business plan for every one of our products. And I have to make sure that in the
first sixty days we a time-to-volume company not a time-to-market company.
We now have hyperchanging, short product life cycles from all of our
competitors and if I don't launch right with the right data and the right pricing
and the right intellect, I will fail," Weedfald says. "All the data we need to be
successful is right here in the CRM, PRM, and knowledge management
systems. And it's a huge weapon." 

57 Channels With Something On

Banner ad campaigns that offer opt-in, permission-based programs are one of
the newer touch points added by Weedfald to collect customer data. Samsung
now runs 18 to 24 different banner ad campaigns 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
365 days a year above-the-fold on 80 high-end Web sites. These banners
generate more than 350 million impressions per month. "Those banners are
about supply chain management, not about advertising," Weedfald says. "And if
you think of it that way and bolt that into your CRM philosophy and your CRM
infrastructure, then you're actually competing on a different plane [than
companies that just run banners haphazardly], because that's a tactic, not a
strategy."

Another information-gathering touch point is the call center. The first question
agents now ask is, What is your email address? The goal is to use the addresses
as case numbers for such situations as problem resolution, queries, to send
authorization numbers, to lower service costs, and to initiate research. "For me
the customer service department is the overall, number one touch point for
CRM," Weedfald says. Now Samsung can send customers a thank-you email
using trigger-based marketing, and can use that email to them to offer to join
opt-in lists for information like new releases and specials. This may lead to new
or incremental sales. That email address may also save the company money.
When a customer calls the toll-free number, Samsung pays for that call. If the
agent needs to call the customer back, Samsung pays for that call. "We have no
record, no trail, email trail, no research data trail, no follow up, no opportunity
to touch that customer again, and we're spending money both ways. That's
unbelievable," Weedfald says. "So you must ask them first, 'What's your email
address?' And if they say they don't have an email address or they don't have a
computer, that will tell us something about the customer's demographics, which
is good for our research." If, for example, the call center gets a number of
callers who don't have computers, Samsung may want to run their zip codes to
see whether these customers fit its target demographic.

Keep in Touch
Banner advertising and email marketing help Samsung by providing data, but
equally important they help the company reach its number one CRM goal,
which is to keep a tight bond with its existing customers. Samsung does this
through consistency, frequency, location, and relevancy. "The best way to fend
of the competitive din is to stay very consistent and frequent and relevant to the
customer at every touch point," Weedfald says. For this reason Samsung runs in
the front-of-book (location) in every issue, whether weekly, biweekly, or
monthly, in 40 magazines. Each ad is customized to be relevant to the audience
of each magazine (relevancy), yet each has the same overall look and feel
(consistency). "Each ad will help the other," Weedfald says, "because in
advertising proper and relevant duplication is good, not bad."

Relevancy also applies when dealing with retail partners. Consequently,

Samsung uses Allegis for its PRM efforts. Customers each have a customized
dashboard that allows them to have such tools as their own views into their
accounts and their own discount levels and year-to-dates. "This is really what
PRM is all about: relevant customization," Weedfald says. "And relevant
customization is easier to create for 4,000 North American dealers and channel
partners than to try to deal with 265 million consumers and individual
businesspeople through some sort of relationship management [software]
system."

Samsung is also using PRM as a communications tool and as an opportunity

manager. "It allows us to move quickly on new opportunities," Kang says.
The CRM team is in the process of building a knowledge management center
that will also help Samsung identify new opportunities. The knowledge
management center will be fed information by the CRM system, third-party
syndicated research, and real-time data from Samsung's sales organization and
its EDI and inventory systems. "It will make us smarter, and better, and more
customer-centric," Kang says.

360 Degrees of Samsung

One of the drivers for creating the knowledge management center is information
sharing. It was also a driver for selecting SAP 3.0 as the CRM platform. "CRM
in Samsung started by changing our processes to be more customer-centric,"
Kang says. "The reason we employed SAP is because we use its ERP system.
CRM should not be stand-alone; it should be tightly integrated with the back-
end ERP system." Whenever the CRM staff communicates with Samsung's
retailers, for example, Samsung's salespeople then need that information. And
equally important, customers can touch anyone in the organization and they
each can provide the same information the customers want. Service, marketing,
sales, and product managers--about 100 people in North America so far--are all
sharing information, so they can provide the same information.

This is critically important, Weedfald says, because it helps Samsung bring

consistency to the customer experience. It's bad enough when a company makes
a mistake with one consumer, but it worse when the mistake is with a corporate
customer. "If you make a mistake on an order of 20 flat-panel displays for a
customer that buys 10,000 flat panels a year, and you don't service it right and
you're not consistent, you've got a big problem. You're not only making a
customer unhappy, you could lose the business."

Currently, most of Samsung's CRM initiative is focused on the business

information warehouse and research, because that is where the company can see
immediate benefits. "We have information, for example, on our technology
peripherals that we never had before. We can compare, say, positive editorial
with sales spikes. That's the kind of information that was never shared across
division before," Goodnough says. "Now that we have consolidated and rolled
this tool out to each of our divisions across North America, we can discuss these
things and get for the first time an idea of what Samsung looks like as a whole
across North America."
The company also plans to roll out its CRM as a decentralized system. Although
that is not yet complete, each location--Dallas; Irvine, Tex.; Ridgefield Park,
N.J.; Canada; and Mexico--has a CRM leader and a Webmaster. The local CRM
leader is responsible for coordinating all CRM activity in terms of retailer and
consumer data collection. "At this phase of the CRM program, I look at it as
research consolidation across North America. SFA, for example, is only active
for the consumer electronics division," Goodnough says. This is due to the way
different divisions sell, he says. The information technology division sells 60
percent through resellers, whereas the consumer electronics division does very
little reseller sales. So the CRM team created a system specifically for the
consumer electronics division at first. That will be rolled out across divisions in
the next year, and in the next two years for North America as a whole.

"This has a multitude of uses in terms of planning and developing new products,
analyzing what works and what doesn't--all of this is to be linked to heads of
divisions in Korea to give them real-time data on what's happening in North
America. They then use that information to do regionally on a worldwide basis
what we can do locally," Weedfald says. "Samsung has invested millions [on
CRM] worldwide. But we're still ensuring that all of the touch points are
validated, turned on, and become part of the process. We still have some work
to do, but you can see the massive, snowballing competitive advantage we
have."

Peter Weedfald One-to-One

Peter Weedfald, vice president, strategic marketing and new media, North
America operations for Samsung Electronics America Inc., discusses in a recent
conversation with CRM magazine Managing Editor Ginger Conlon, why having
a personal CRM philosophy is integral to the success of a CRM initiative.

CRM: What is your personal CRM philosophy?

Peter Weedfald: My personal philosophy is customers really matter. It's
understanding that if you lose one customer you may lose hundreds more. A
simple example of what CRM means is this: Samsung runs advertisements in
magazines, and I take the time to pick up the phone and call my own ad. 
I can tell you that if you pick up the phone right now, and ask 40 people who
run marketing for their companies and you say, "You just ran an ad with a 1-800
number, have you called it personally?" I will bet you that 99 percent will say,
"No, I haven't called it. I'm the vice president of strategic marketing." These
executives have just spent millions of dollars to do a touch point of
communications to consumers, to retailers, to the channel, and then they never
check to see the experience.

CRM: What happened when you called Samsung's toll-free customer

service number?
Weedfald: I found there were areas to improve. Now I've only been here since
last October, and it was the first time I'd run all these ads. So calling the contact
center made me realize that we needed to inform agents about these new ads. So
we improved our communication with the support center, because it's critically
important that the experience that the consumers and retailers have is, in the
language of CRM, best of breed. 

CRM: How else have you tested Samsung's CRM efforts?

Weedfald: I go shopping. If I really care about my customers--consumers,
retailers, and channel partners--which I do, when I go to do an executive
meeting at one of these retailers, I would really be ashamed to think that I didn't
have a shopping experience at one of its stores before I meet with its president.
So I do it all the time.

CRM: Give an example of a recent shopping trip.

Weedfald: To the store manager's astonishment, I went to Tweeters to buy a
Samsung DVD-2000. When it arrived at my office my team and I opened the
box to live through the experience.

We build a list of questions [to use when we call Samsung's customer service],
the first of which I call stupified questions. These are questions like, "Hi, I just
got this, but I can't seem to turn it on." How do the CSRs respond? Then we
break something on it and ask, "What do we do with it now, how do we get it
fixed?" because it has a warranty. We try to go through the experience, and we
should go through the experience. And shame on anybody who has the
discipline of spending money on advertising and marketing communications
and shame on anybody who is the king, queen, or nobility of CRM and doesn't
go through that process.

CRM: Why do you do this?

Weedfald: If a consumer buys a product and has a problem, she will first call
the retailer. So now I have two bimodal customers: the retailer, who doesn't
want to get calls on boxed products, and the consumer. This is a big job:
Customers really matter. So I better make sure all of this really works. And I
want to see, What is the in-box experience? What's in there? Brochures,
warranty cards, the manual? Companies must have a market-driven philosophy
that says, if you don't love customers, if you don't want to take care of our
customers and worry about them, you're in the wrong place. It needs to be in the
blood. This philosophy needs to be in the DNA of everyone in the organization
to withstand the wrenching pain of building the technology infrastructure. CRM
should look like this: We have our customers' best interests at heart.

CRM: How else do you conduct in-store research?

Weedfald: Samsung retains a detailing firm. This company visits retail stores
that sell our products to check Samsung's stock, check the competitions' prices,
features, and benefits, talk to customers to find out whether they're thinking of
purchasing a Samsung product and why or why not, check whether current
rebates or other offers are on the shelf. The detailing firm reports directly to me.
The reason is that I have positioned and gotten buy-in in the company that the
detailers are an extension of CRM. 

Every day these detailers, at the end of their day, go to the Internet to deliver all
that data back to my CRM department. Through data mining we will be able to
distinguish relevant data and get that back to our product development group,
sales organization, marketing communications group. And we will have instant
unionization of push and pull though incredible supply chain management of
communications, marketing, advertising, and data that will give us a
competitive advantage.

CRM: How does your personal CRM philosophy mesh with Samsung's
corporate CRM philosophy? 
Weedfald: I want to reach out to those people who have rewarded Samsung by
purchasing our products. I want to thank them by showing them that we're
coming out with the latest, the newest; that our service and support is strong;
that if you call our 800 number for information, we give you the information.
We do this so that you'll be an extension of our marketing and salesmanship.

The number one person who I am trying to advertise to is people who have
already bought my product. I'm willing to bet that nearly 100 percent of my
competition would never give you that answer. They're probably trying to reach
the informed, the early adopters, those who shop at shopping malls. Good. Let
them keep thinking that. Because I want to reach [the more than 50 million
Samsung customers] and remind them that we work twice as hard, three times
as hard to deliver the best service, the best support, the best usability
experience. And when I reach back out to them through advertising, they say to
themselves, "Aren't I smart? Aren't I happy? Aren't I lucky? Aren't I the
greatest." These people then want to evangelize the company.

The 7 secrets of CRM

1. Start with a personal CRM philosophy

Managers who oversees a company's CRM initiative must have their own CRM
philosophy before they can successfully create and promote their companies'
CRM philosophy.

2. Remember that every customer contact is a touch point 

This includes people, from the receptionist to customer service reps to
salespeople; communications, including ads, email marketing, direct mail, and
Web sites; products and packaging; even partners.

3. Realize that marketing and sales are the same

A salesperson's goal is, in the space of one sales call, to get the prospect's
attention, interest, conviction, desire, and close him. An advertisement has 30
seconds to get the prospect's attention, interest, conviction, desire, and close
him. It's the same process for both.

4. Experience your own CRM 

Managers who oversee their companies' CRM should periodically call their toll-
free numbers with test questions to experience service from a customer's
perspective. Managers should also go through the process of purchasing their
own products, sign up to receive their own email newsletters, and place
themselves on the mailing list to receive their own direct mail.

5. Benefit from CRM as a science of research 

Use the information collected from customers, Web site data, and partners to
create more powerful, targeted messages and programs.

6. Know that CRM is choice, not chance 

People have access to more information than ever on products and 
services to help them make purchasing decisions. Providing them with choice--
product choice, communications/media choice, service choice--will lead them to
your company. Otherwise, you're just leaving your sales efforts up to chance.

7. Create the unionization of push and pull 

Supply chain management of marketing, communications, advertising, database
information--that's highly relevant and highly personalized--creates the
unionization of push and pull between a company and its customers.

To contact the editors, please email [email protected]

Every month, CRM magazine covers the customer relationship management

industry and beyond. To subscribe, please
visithttp://www.destinationCRM.com/subscribe/.

The call centre, which is a part of Samsung's customer relationship management

(CRM) initiative, is designed to help the company understand its customers'
requirements and subsequently fulfill their expectations. 

The call centre, 800-SAMSUNG, is also the first in the UAEto benefit from
Etisalat's upgraded service, which allows companies to register their names or
services as a part of the 800-toll free dial-up number that can be accessed by
simply dialing the numbers on the key pad which represent the alphabets.

Mr. Y. Y. Shin, General Manager of Samsung's Gulf Customer Satisfaction

Headquarter (GCSHQ) said: "Samsung is a customer-centric company and we
always aim to put the customer first in everything that we do, whether it is
designing aesthetics of our sophisticated digital products or offering an easy to
remember toll-free number to address queries pertaining to Samsung products.
We have reaffirmed our commitment to our customers in the UAE by launching
the first Samsung Call Centre. With this call centre, we aspire to be even more
focused in our approach towards our valued customers and address their
feedback on a one-to-one basis." 

The key element of the Samsung call centre is its simplicity. Customers simply
have to call 800-SAMSUNG during work hours and they will be instantly
connected to the company's bilingual call agents, capable of speaking in Arabic
and English languages. 

Customers have everything to gain from this: they can avail assistance on
different subjects, right from obtaining product information to make informed
purchase decisions to logging their feedback about Samsung products and seek
after sales support. Furthermore, customer can even offers suggestion on what
additional features they would like to see in Samsung products, to ensure that
upcoming products can be customized to include their wish-list.

The project has been initially rolled out only to customers in UAE, however in
the second and the third phases, Samsung plans to extend the call centre
services to customers in the GCC countries and across the Middle East region
respectively.

"Samsung Electronics began to employ CRM in late 1999, in order to

understand the requirements of its customers and build stronger relationships
with them." Mr. Shin added.

The letters of the 800-SAMSUNG are based on combinations of numbers. So to

reach the call centre, all a customer needs to remember is the correct name
'SAMSUNG' and then dial the letters on the keypad, which would translate to
the numbers 800-7267864. 

"Etisalat's revamped '800- My NAME' has taken an unprecedented advantage of

latest technology to further enable businesses exploit marketing potential.
Armed with this innovative feature, we are confident that our efficient customer
service team will further establish a new benchmark in world-class customer
relationship management," Mr. Srikant Gullapali, Manager, Samsung GCSHQ
concluded.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/44292840/Marketing-Strategies-of-Samsung