Blue Martini Attacks Retail With CRM Application

Blue Martini

The company initially focused on providing insight into personal interactions "directly with customers through Web sites. Now we're taking that same back-end engine and enabling those same capabilities for customers in stores," said Chip Overstreet, vice president of corporate marketing and business development for Blue Martini, based here.

Blue Martini Retail plans to bring customer information right to a store's cash register so a salesperson can see information about the customer's preferences and mention specials and promotions that might appeal to the buyer. "The system issues a credit check but also checks a realtime customer profile to identify information about you. The retailer can then choose what information to push to you directly," Overstreet said.

If the customer is a Donna Karan lover, as evidenced by her online purchases at the store's Web site, the salesperson might mention a special sale on those clothes, or a similar brand, for example.

So far, most of the CRM giants like Siebel Systems have only scratched the surface of in-store retail applications, analysts said.

"E.Piphany has probably done the most, and the others have done a smattering in retail with mixed success partially because those packages come out of a heritage of B2B CRM," said Josh Jewett, store systems practice leader at Answerthink. "What Blue Martini brings to the table and what they do well is the business-to-consumer end of CRM."

Retailing is crying out for upselling and cross-selling capabilities, he added. "What Blue Martini has put together is designed to take all the lessons they've learned over the years and apply them to the new needs retailers have," Jewett said. For example, "clienteling," in which individual salespeople keep track of key customers' sizes, brand preferences, birthdays, anniversaries, etc., is a natural fit for an automated system, provided the sales associates enter that information into the system, observers said.

That way, the knowledge doesn't "walk across the street" when the sales associate leaves the store for a new opportunity, Overstreet said.

"We focus on closing the loop on leveraging the data warehouse investment [many retailers have made," said Catherine Harding, Blue Martini's director of retail industry solutions.

The software runs atop standard Web servers, BEA Weblogic and IBM WebSphere and works with Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 databases, the company said.

Pricing starts at $85,000 per module. A multichannel gift registry application runs about $200,000.