Excerpted from
StrateScapes - Volume 5, Number 1

Adventures in CRM
Ski resorts,entertainment venues,energy providers … just a few of the unlikely CRM candidates reaping the payoff of customer-focused marketing.

Ski resorts tap the Echo Boom.
Skiers are getting younger. Slopes once dominated by Boomers are now the domain of hot-dogging Gen Xers and Echo Boomers. And the ski industry is hot on their trail.

“We started to sense a general uptick in kids on the slopes,” says Michael F. Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA). “But it wasn’t until we looked at the demographics that we realized there are about 72 million kids under age 18 in the United States.” That’s when the solution became clear: Lure parents back to the mountains by positioning the resorts as a year-round family destination.

Last year the NSAA launched a 15-year Model for Growth. The plan encourages NSAA members to launch one-to-one initiatives such as data warehousing, frequency programs and channel integration — and provides resources and guidance on making such initiatives pay off.

California’s Mammoth Mountain is leading the charge with innovative customer-loyalty programs such as its frequent skier program. Members sign up for daily or weekly snow-condition reports, plus updates on upcoming events and offers.

In a recent promotion, Mammoth sent a survey to its email subscribers asking them about season lift ticket prices. Based on the survey responses, Mammoth offered an early-bird season pass rate of $375 — which garnered an impressive 13 percent response rate.

The light goes on at Northeast Utilities.
Incumbent utility providers have two strategic advantages over upstarts: large percentages of the area’s existing customer base, plus a wealth of data on those customers. But Connecticut-based Northeast Utilities (NU) knew that wouldn’t be enough. The company set out to grab customer share before deregulation led to fierce competition.

NU started by building a data warehouse to combine data from all business lines (gas, electric and NU’s Smart Living lighting catalog) and construct customer profiles to help NU promote, cross-sell and upsell new and existing products.

These customer profiles also helped NU uncover other relationship-building opportunities — such as improving call-center customer service, providing customers with unbiased educational resources on deregulation and energy usage, and upgrading its Web site to provide often-requested features such as online bill-pay and bill presentment.

Is all this customer-centricity working? It’s too early to assess NU’s ability to stave off the competition, since electric competition in NU’s market just started in July, and gas competition doesn’t yet exist there. But NU executives believe they’re doing all the right things to position the company for future success. Others seem to agree: The American Customer Satisfaction Index gave NU a 72 out of 100 rating — a 5.6 percent increase over the previous year.

Madison Square Garden gets its game face on.
Even a basketball team with record sellouts and legendary fan loyalty can use a shot of customer-focused marketing. That’s the thinking behind Madison Square Garden’s (MSG) New York Knicks customer-centric program.

MSG — owner of the New York Knicks, Rangers and Liberty, among other properties — has set out to become the number-one choice in a city rich with entertainment options. One way MSG is working toward that goal is through the NYK MAIL e-mail program. Knicks fans personalize their free e-mail subscriptions by providing MSG with personal profile information. In return they receive exclusive Knicks offers, plus offers tied to other events staged at the Garden.

So far, 98 percent of the 38,000 Knicks fans subscribed to NYK MAIL have shared personal and lifestyle information. And that information, supplemented by customer-satisfaction surveys and market research, is helping MSG make strides toward its goal of understanding how customers think, what they want, where they live and why they come.