CRM is not just about slick technology and seeing how much you can sell to your customers today; it’s about building relationships so that you can sell to them tomorrow. If the technology doesn’t suit our core beliefs, we don’t invest in it.

We realize our views diverge from conventional CRM wisdom, but we believe that QVC customers sense and appreciate our efforts. While they might not come right out and say, "Thank you for not trying to sell me a bunch of stuff that I don’t want or need," they vocalize it in other ways with their on-air testimonials, positive recommendations to others and their high satisfaction ratings. In fact, more than 25 percent of our customers come to us by word of mouth.

Don’t Assume

How, then, do we build trust? We start by being careful not to be presumptuous about what might interest the customer. Human beings are individuals. They are not motivated by demographics or marketing variables. They are often motivated by circumstances. So, rather than assume we always know what our customers want and bombard them with offers, we restrict our upselling efforts to a very small, targeted segment. The rest of the time, we are content to know that customers are calling simply to place an order for a particular item, and we strive to make that as easy as possible for them.

Our ability to give customers a positive experience depends on our customer service representatives, whom we refer to as customer advocates. Calling them advocates encourages them to listen for ways that QVC can best serve the customers. They then raise those concerns up the ladder. For example, our entire Denim & Co. proprietary fashion line was built on suggestions and comments from customers. It works too, since 93 percent of our customers rate their overall satisfaction with our representatives as excellent.

As the Internet started to take hold in the mid-’90s, customers began to expect instant access to a wealth of information. But our customer advocates were using an old, text-only "green screen" system, so they couldn’t always answer customers’ questions about products. In 1997, we began looking for more visual technology that would give reps better product information and help them serve customers more efficiently. We quickly decided to steer clear of CRM vendors who were touting cross-selling technologies and whose products didn’t lend themselves to customization. Instead, we chose to build our own thin-client, browser-based customer service system. We developed it from the representatives’ point of view based on how they interact with customers.