If you know what attributes are selling together, you can implement an automated recommendation engine (EmcienMatch) and your sales rep can recommend a good choice to the customer during the ordering process. This is probably the single biggest value of knowing what attributes customers are buying. Your sales reps are a trusted advisor to your customers. If the sales person know that all customers of a certain type bough a particular configuration, he could recommend that choice to the customer. Win! Customer is happy because he done! Sales person is happy because he looks smart! You are happy because you increased your sales repeatability!
Reporting, Business Intelligence and Data mining cause data overload. We need to provide business users with actionable tasks based on analytics.
We offer a configurable product. Our biggest opportunity is that customers do not fully specify what they want. They just specify a few features they want, and leave the rest to the sales rep. They want the sales rep to recommend a good choice. Like we see on Amazon e-store…. But we are not selling simple stuff like books. Everyone on our team talked and agreed about an Amazon like strategy, and we knew that we needs more sophisticated tools to accomplish that for our products, which are highly configurable. However - if we can recommend a few configurations at the point of sale, it is a win-win”.
The technology has arrived to make self-service possible for all configurable products. Companies who embrace it quickly will enjoy a competitive advantage in their industry. This is a truly demand driven model, driving much higher customer satisfaction.
More than half of companies recently surveyed by Aberdeen Group reduce inventory as their top response to tough times. The study, “Inventory Management: Three Key Strategies to Freeing Working Capital,” points out that using the right technology to manage inventory levels helps provide firms with a competitive advantage during the downturn and positions them well for better times [...]
Every five or so years, I shop for a new car. I hate car shopping. The haggling, the long trips to dealerships way outside of town, the hours and hours of waiting, punctuated by furtive whispers to my husband, “Don’t give in! Stick to our budget! But don’t tell them our budget!” and similar. But [...]
Your salespeople are representing and selling your product. Customers who want to buy your product typically list a few things they want and look to the salesperson to guide them. The salesperson is their advisor on your product offering. The salesperson is expected to know the product and suggest good choices for the customer. Is your salesperson equipped to do that?
Advances in interconnection technologies are driving an increasingly demand-driven market. Customers are learning to expect to get what they want, when they want it, how they want it. And they tell you in each and every interaction they have with your company, or not. In a demand-driven world, increasing product variation and complexity in your [...]
