|
CRM Wal
Mart
Wal-Mart may
have been around since 1962, but they're still a young company at
heart. Never a day goes by that they don't strive to improve
themselves and the way Wal-Mart do business. All of this is due to
their outstanding associates, and whatever your interests may be,
you will find a perfect fit at Wal-Mart. Are you interested in
becoming a pilot? Then check out the Aviation department. There are
also opportunities with CRM WAL-Mart, Wal-Mart International,
Logistics and Walmart.com, as well as many other departments
throughout the company. Wal-Mart offer careers that give associates
the chance to succeed and exceed to their full potential In CRM
Wal-Mart.
As part of a
comprehensive move toward e-commerce, the largest
U.S. retailer is building a self-service system
to let customers check their orders. According to NetByTel, which
will provide Wal-Mart with its order status module using CRM
Wal-Mart, the new tool will allow Wal-Mart's Internet customers to
use the telephone to obtain real-time order status. The companies
said the order status module will reduce the amount of time
Walmart.com's customers spend waiting on hold for a live agent and
will reduce its call-center operating costs by lowering
long-distance costs and costs per call. Walmart.com customers will
interact with NetByTel's technology for repetitive inquiries, such
as, "Where is my order?" through a polite, friendly "virtual agent
using new CRM Wal-Mart”. Avalone said NetByTel hopes to expand its
CRM Wal-Mart service to the retail store side of the company,
especially since Wal-Mart has bought back its e-commerce counterpart
CRM Wal-Mart. "We have an entire suite of modules," Avalone said,
"some of which interested Wal-Mart. As with most customers, they
want to put their toe in the water and feel the customer reaction
using this type of solution."
Measuring the
effectiveness of an IT investment is a near impossible task. For a
start there are many different criteria with which business success
can be accounted. Some companies are driven by profit, others by
market share, others by growth and many others by stock value. In
many cases huge spending on IT is forced on companies simply because
the competitors have invested. Nowhere was this more obvious than in
data warehousing and CRM. CRM Wal-Mart probably started it all. To
give them credit they gambled on data warehousing and won; the
competitors could have done the same, but they would not take the
gamble. Once Wal-Mart had won dominance of the market then the other
super-stores had to follow suit using CRM Wal-Mart, or so it has
been universally assumed. But there is no proof that it was the Data
Warehouse alone that won the day, it could just as easily have been
bulk purchasing or better store locations, in other words simply a
better business model than the others.
The bottom line
of all this is that companies should be spending far more of their
resources on other things than IT. To quote Paul Strassmann "the
lack of correlation between IT spending and profitability should be
seen as evidence that other influences such as strategic advantage,
competitive positioning and leadership are likely to be more
effective".
The desktop is
the obvious place where vast sums of money are wasted. How could
anyone justify the cost of upgrading current PCs, both hardware and
software, just to run another version of Office? In fact most
companies are going to resist that upgrade and are significantly
extending the life of their existing investment. But it is not just
PC investments that need to be analyzed. Are there any real
advantages from the introduction of ERP systems? We wonder and come
back to an old adage; the real benefits of IT lie in data
processing, "keep the stock levels down and get the invoices out
early". That is easy to cost justify and that is exactly CRM
Wal-Mart is doing.
| 
