Oak Brook, IL–With a catalog, a retail chain, and a Website, apparel marketer Eddie Bauer has taken a closer look at customer relationship management (CRM) lately. In a March 27 session at The E-tail Solutions World Forum, Michael Boyd, director of CRM for the Redmond, WA-based Spiegel subsidiary, provided a candid overview of the company’s multichannel challenges.
Key to the Eddie Bauer’s success with multichannel CRM was learning about the “need state,” or how the motivation for shopping varies by channel. Eddie Bauer reached a turning point when “we realized we were not stealing business from other channels” by expanding its Web presence and retail chain, Boyd said. “We also had to start looking at CRM as a business strategy, not a systems issue.”