Chicken Rice and CRM

Some say “customer is king (or queen)” – but how do you actually make your customer feel so? Resident contributor, Isaac Timothy T, uses a personal anecdote to illustrate the importance of customer relationship management and what it entails.

I love the routine I have with the chicken rice guy near my office. Every time he sees me approach, he will make a gesture indicating the packaging of the rice. I would respond by either pointing down, indicating I would be eating at the coffee-shop, or by making a thumbs-up signal with my right hand, indicating that I would want it to go. By the time I reach the stall, my meal is almost prepared. The only time we both speak is when he asks, ‘Egg?’ and I reply with either ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

I love the economy in time and especially words of this routine because it allows me to walk to the chicken rice stall, get my food and return to the office in about ten minutes.

The routine is possible because the chicken rice stall guy (i.e. CRSG) knows the history of my purchases. He uses that as the base, by assuming my next purchase would be the same, to add the further choice of whether I want an egg to go with the meal. He knows the ‘what’. He also knows the ‘where’ – either eating at the coffee-shop or back in the office.

Granted that compared to other businesses, the variety of choices when ordering from the CRSG is limited, I think it is a valid question to ask how many businesses in Singapore work at remembering the ‘what’, ‘when’,'how’ and ‘where’ with regards to their customers.

There are two relevant topics to this question: personalization and discovery. These two fields are being worked on by online companies. For example, Google is trying to personalize the results of an individual’s query. Another example would be Amazon recommending books that you might be interested in buying.

One of the foundations of personalization and discovery is the history that the sites know about an individual’s interaction with it. For personalization, this history is used to infer the preferences of an individual and present information that is related to these preferences. For discovery, the history of the individual is combined with that of other users to make inferences on recommendations of information that would interest an individual.

If there are more offline businesses than online businesses in Singapore and if personalization and discovery are important to retain and satisfy customers and generate more sales with existing customers in the online markets then it might not be off the mark to ask how offline businesses are working on personalization and discovery. What are the tools available to such businesses?

Let me give another example. I buy my boardgames from Paradigm Infinitum located in Midpoint Orchard. There is a member of the staff there whom I talk to whenever I go to the shop. He knows the games I have bought and every time I go he would recommend games similar to them. I have actually bought a few games that I would not have discovered much less bought if not for his recommendations. Some of my friends, who had just been introduced to boardgames, that I have introduced to the store have bought games per his recommendation and these games are of the type that I would like to play; by association my friends have also got games they enjoyed.

The issue with the two examples I have shared are that they depend on the memory of an individual. How then can that memory be transferred to the business such that if ever the equivalent of the CRSG is not around, the business can still remember an individual’s history. How can one waitress remember what another waitress served a customer two weeks ago?

Are there are Customer Relationship Management (i.e. CRM) tools out there that can help offline businesses remember the history of their relationship with a customer? Are there any tools which allow businesses to use the history in facilitating personalization and discovery? Do the readers know of such tools?

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