Newsletter - January

New Challenges for Wineries:
managing multiple customer databases in growing times
Wineries that have a shopping cart, email signup list, wine club, and Point of Sale system are spending more time than ever to keep customer records accurate across all databases.

For instance, when a customer calls the wine club manager with an address change, who in your winery performs the database updates for this customer in the other systems? Likewise, if an online customer changes their address in their shopping cart profile and the winery isn't notified, the 'which-customer-record-in-which-customer-database should-we-use-for-our-next-mailer/wineclub-shipment?' question becomes a serious issue.

How about when a customer walks into the tasting room to taste and buy wine, do the tasting room personnel know if this customer is a VIP customer who just purchased hundreds of dollars of wine recently online? How about if they belong to the wine club? Even if this information is available, do they have the ability to find out easily and immediately while on the tasting room floor?

Business Process is Important:
be Customer-centric, not Transaction-centric
The above scenarios happen in wineries that use separate vendors for their online shopping cart, email list manager, wine club, and/or Point of Sale in the tasting room. This peacemeal approach is the suggested method by many web developers and 'marketing gurus' because according to them, it's a 'least cost' approach. Low initial cost means faster ROI, they say.

The bottom line is that separate transaction-centric systems (i.e. Shopping Cart) create separate customer databases, and if these systems can't talk to each other, they can't automatically coordinate which customer records are most accurate. This forces winery personnel to juggle these islands of customer information to make sure the right customers are on the right lists, and that each customer record is accurate for the next transaction, whether it be online or off.

Salaried employees at the winery that are spending hours every week managing customer records in multiple databases is not, in my opinion, a 'least cost' method to go about doing business. Further, if your customer data isn't accurate, you don't have a full view (and possible access) to each and every one of your customers.

One Database, One Customer
When you centralize your customer information in one place, managing customer records becomes a much easier task. Further, if this customer database is web-enabled, your customers can manage their own account(s) online for you. How's that for a time saver among winery staff members?

In todays winery marketplace, most solutions with existing large wineries will not involve a single-vendor. This is due to the fact that wineries have existing legacy systems in place that work well, and resistance to give up those systems for new ones becomes a trust and dollar-and-time-eater issue. Further, we still have a long way to go from a wine industry technological standpoint to get all of the winery-focused vendor systems to talk to each other over various networks and database architectures.

I believe that the most important thing today for wineries when considering deploying new points of sale for their customers is to choose vendors that offer open-architecture systems so they can be networked and customized enough to talk to your existing systems in real-time.

When wineries are spending less time making sure customer information is correct, they'll have more time to make great wine and communicate how they are different from the rest.