Customer's the king & a source of innovation too!

We have all been brought up hearing stories of the customer being the king and how serving this all important king is the make or break for all businesses - big or small. True. But serving this omnipotent King starts with perfecting the fine art of sincere 'listening' – however successful or big one may be. One often-missed reality is that this listening is a valuable source of business innovation and all it takes is an investment in a good CRM tool. After analyzing several CRM reports and customer feedback, the CEO of Walmart.com realised the fallacy in the previously held perception about this new web front attracting its own set of unique customers. It was actually being used by offline regulars to check the product range before their store visit! Post this feedback, the web front was tweaked to serve as an ally of the offline stores (by running live campaigns to drive more offline retail traffic) than as a standalone website. Thus active listening and consistent CRM analysis helped Walmart to use the webfront as an innovative marketing tool for its main (offline) business rather than wasting money promoting both businesses separately.