Customer service or inside sales?

Tonight I’ve been thinking a lot about our customers at LiveOutThere.com. Unfortunately Magento does not provide any standard tools to begin to understand who they are, what they want, and ultimately, how to sell more product to them. I wanted to do a quick analysis to answer some basic questions and provoke discussion among our team, so I put together a little report. This SQL query (use it on your Magento 1.6.1 database and update the LIKE statements to suit your own brands) tells me some very useful things:

-- assuming Magento 1.6.1 data model
SELECT DISTINCT customer_email,
	COUNT(*) AS purchases,
	(SELECT LEFT(created_at,11) FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 0,1) AS last_purchase,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%IB%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS icebreaker,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%TNF%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS the_north_face,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%MHW%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS mountain_hardwear,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%MAR%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS marmot,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%LOLE%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS lole,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%SW%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS smartwool,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%OSP%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS osprey,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%SOR%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS sorel,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%ARC%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS arcteryx,
	(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sales_flat_order_item WHERE product_type = 'simple' AND sku LIKE '%COL%' AND order_id IN (SELECT entity_id FROM `sales_flat_order` WHERE customer_email = a.customer_email)) AS columbia
FROM `sales_flat_order` AS a
GROUP BY customer_email
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC

The output of that query tells me how many times a particular email address has purchased from us (this aggregates together guest and logged-in-customer purchases, which is what I want), the date of their last purchase, and the number of items they have purchased from each of the major brands that we carry. The output looks something like this:

Now, it’s fairly obvious that the customer in row #2 is a great customer. They have made 7 purchases, each time buying a product from Arc`teryx, one of our premium brands. This person clearly loves Arc`teryx. Could they make my job as a marketer any more clear?

In most cases, you don’t see such a clear, strong, signal. I believe when you do, it should be acted on. This kind of business intelligence is immediately valuable. In LiveOutThere.com’s case, the Spring 2012 line is right around the corner, and I know that I will be able to sell that customer some great kit in a personal, intelligent way.

This brings me around to the title of my post, which questions the similarities between customer service and inside sales roles, and how the lines should blur in a boutique e-commerce operation like LiveOutThere.com. There are some fundamental aspects to customer service – fulfillment, communication, availability, etc. – but when you have those under control, I believe you need to build on those fundamentals and have your “customer service” team sell back to your customers in a precise, targeted way. And that’s a sales force, not a customer service department.

I believe we sell some truly great gear — the best available. Our team knows their stuff and can give you well-founded recommendations based on their personal experience with the product. When we know the most about your buying habits and preferences, we can serve you better than anyone else, and that’s just the reality. It’s better for our customers and it’s better for us.

On a practical level, we use this intimate knowledge of our customers to quickly create segments in our email marketing system. Take a peek:

How do you feel about that? Would you rather receive emails that are increasingly relevant to your needs, interests, and position in the buying cycle, or does it just piss you off?

Marketing has become increasingly micro-targeted over the last 10 years and you will see me talking about this more and more in the context of Magento e-commerce. It’s a fascinating, contemporary subject and brings up many interesting topics (privacy concerns certainly one of them) but I believe that in another 10 years our customers will absolutely not stand for marketing with a broad brush-stroke.