InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

The software also lets the Blazers better understand who their corporate sponsors are--and when and how those sponsors are spending their advertising dollars. The Blazers use this data to create new events and services, build loyalty through improved customer and sponsor services, and target and track sales and marketing campaigns.

Front Office lets the Blazers handle seat relocation requests more efficiently. Before the team implemented Front Office, customers had to fax their requests and would often have to wait several days for a response. With Front Office, team representatives can create an electronic file with the customer's name, account number, and priority number. "That employee can approach the process in a more structured, automated way, letting us keep track of customers and respond quickly to their requests," Cesarano says.

Moreover, sales executives can now run season-ticket renewal and forecasting reports, as well as real-time sales reports that show how many season tickets are sold in any given day, week, or month. As a result, customer-service representatives can better manage thousands of seat- relocation requests from season-ticket holders.

While Cesarano has not done any hard return-on-investment calculations, he says what matters is that employees can work more efficiently. Given faster, more reliable access to customer data, representatives can make better business decisions that improve service and keep customers coming back. And sales are up, though Cesarano would not discuss by how much--noting that other factors, including the team's first-place showing, are also involved.

Front Office gives users easier access to account information, says Nathan Currie, an account executive with the Blazers. "We can locate accounts through customer name, phone numbers, and phone numbers, which we weren't able to do before. Also, it gives us easy access to new leads, say, by name, income level, or address."

Having several points of contact means sales representatives can analyze trends in the community, which lets them do their jobs better. If, for instance, a new business opens in the northeast section of Portland, the Blazers' salespeople can track and target that section.

Cesarano and his team also used Front Office to integrate Ticketmaster's online and phone ticketing system with their own. "We can capture customer information from the Ticketmaster system, transfer it into Front Office, and manipulate it using a custom piece of code," says Cesarano. As a result, the Blazers can capture not only the customer information that pours directly into their own system, but also data such as recent purchasing behavior and transactions history about every event that Ticketmaster sells.

By early this year, the Blazers will integrate their Web site with the customer-service operation. To do this, the team will implement Onyx's Web Wizards, software that lets sales organizations capture customer information online and also respond quickly to product inquiries.

The Blazers' gradual approach to CRM implementation is typical, says Steve Bonadio, program director at Meta Group. "Few companies today have cross-functional CRM in place," he says. They have approached it piecemeal, implementing CRM just in the sales or marketing department, for example. But that's changing as more companies begin to think long term about customer loyalty and retention."

Bonadio says more companies will begin to view CRM as an integrated ecosystem of operational, analytical, and collaborative applications. Operational applications automate sales and marketing, customer service, and mobile and field sales; analytical applications enable companies to extract and analyze data from CRM systems or other systems, such as a Web site, a back-end enterprise resource planning system, or a legacy system; and collaborative applications serve up information about "points of interaction"--that is, direct interaction with the customer by fax, letter, E-mail, phone, or the Internet.

Cesarano expects some technical challenges as the Blazers expand the CRM solution. "We'll have to manage a much larger volume of data coming off the Web," he says. "We'll also have to figure out how to clean up the data, to make sure that we're using only useful, legitimate, and accurate data."

Despite the technical challenges, the Blazers will be counting on CRM tools to keep some of basketball's most rabid fans loyal and the business profitable long after the final buzzer.

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Illustration by James F. Kraus