Yang Shengchao: Give customers what they want most

Wyeth, one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world, is most famous in China not for any kind of medicine, but for its infant formula. Someone once said that when looking at the lively and cute chubby little angel in Wyeth's golden milk powder TV commercial, which new mother can't be tempted? In fact, what really moved Chinese mothers was that Wyeth always knew what was on their minds and always gave them what they wanted most at the right time.

"What young parents buy is not milk powder, but hope for their babies," Yang Shengchao often tells his employees. The national customer relationship director of Shanghai Wyeth Nutritional Products Co., Ltd. has joined the company for six years and has personally witnessed the development of Wyeth CRM from scratch, from the initial simple hotline consultation to the one-to-one personalized service. In 2003, Wyeth CRM, which was just established for two years, was awarded the "Special Award" by GreaterChinaCRM for its rapid progress; in 2004, it defeated a number of competitors such as Abbott and Mead Johnson and won the "Best CRM Implementation Pharmaceutical Enterprise in China" award.

When you joined Wyeth Nutrition in 1999, there was no CRM department. What was the biggest difference between the customer service then and now?

Wyeth was the first in China's nutritional products industry to set up a customer service department and the first 800 toll-free hotline. That was back in 1996, when the service was simple: mostly hiring pediatric experts to answer some product usage and parenting queries, and some small-scale consumer events. Because there is no national unified database, customer data is scattered in more than a dozen major business cities, and customer analysis cannot be done, so it is relatively passive, basically waiting for users to come to us.

A few years later, the business has grown bigger and bigger. We see that consumers not only pay attention to the quality of milk powder, but also want to obtain added value outside the product. Therefore, at the end of 2001, a national unified customer relationship management department was established to unify the data scattered across the country to Shanghai for management. The purpose is to subdivide our consumer groups through data analysis, implement one-to-one personalized services, and Assist with marketing work.

How do you understand this kind of personalized service you are talking about?

Personalization includes many possibilities, starting with different segmentation methods for consumers. For example, it is easiest to divide them from the physiological stage: some are pregnant women, some are new mothers, and they need different services; they can be divided from the purchased products: gold packs, color packs, cans, and boxes. Generally speaking, people who buy canned gold milk powder have a relatively high consumption level. They don’t care much about small gifts or low-cost promotions, and they are more concerned about whether there are some parenting lectures or expert guidance; , relatively sensitive to price, would prefer more promotions and gifts. After segmentation, customer service can provide more proactive and targeted services. For three different products, we can design different marketing campaigns, instead of covering all consumers with one campaign.

In what ways does Wyeth obtain consumer information? What is the valuable information you care about?

There are four main channels for obtaining customer information: in more than 1,000 shopping malls across the country, there are salesmen from Wyeth, who come into contact with new customers. If they are interested, they can fill in the information. This is the most proactive one. There are information cards in the product packaging, which can be filled in; Wyeth's activities are introduced in the newspaper, and consumers who are willing to participate can fill in the information and send it back; in addition, they can also leave information by dialing 800. Although these methods seem passive, they can actually attract those who are really interested.

We will collect many kinds of information, in addition to some basic ones, such as the mother's age, education level, address, phone number, but also including whether the baby is a boy or a girl, which hospital was born, when was born, and what feeding way and so on. These information can help the realization of personalized service, and through effective information analysis and filtering, the most valuable and potential target customer groups can be found.

Enterprises do CRM, one of the very important purposes is to retain old customers, the other is to find new customers, so how does personalized service help in these two aspects?

This is a matter of great concern to us. When the customer's data enters Wyeth's system, we start to do a series of maintenance and service. For example, a pregnant woman purchased our maternity milk powder or Martena nutrition tablets, and we will call her regularly at certain times when she needs information most based on her information. For example, one month before giving birth, she will pay attention to what needs to be prepared for labor in the hospital, the precautions during the production process, and the care of the newborn; after the baby is born, there are also different stages, such as a 6-month-old child, facing from Weaning from baby to older baby is a headache for many mothers. Then we will also call to tell her what problems may arise, what to do, and the experiences of some other consumers.

Many times, the parenting information from these phone calls or direct mail has nothing to do with the milk powder itself. We just anticipate what they may care about and need, and then help her answer it. In this way, while serving, customers are also maintained. In 2004, consumers' retention rate of Wyeth products increased by about 10 percentage points, which is actually an increase in loyalty.

For new customers, our 800 hotline receives more than 15,000 calls each month, many of which are not from Wyeth users. We will not refuse such a person, but communicate with her through services, and will also provide some trial opportunities, allowing her to decide whether to choose Wyeth in the future. This process is to discover and nurture potential customers.

Now some companies' telephone interviews may arouse disgust among consumers. Does Wyeth have any concerns in this regard?

To be clear, our call is for service, not sales. The Wyeth 800 hotline advisors are all doctors with more than three years of experience, and there are two retired pediatric chief physicians; and all the advisors who do telephonic interviews are nurses, in order to provide professional guidance services. In addition, when the consumer fills in the information, one of them is to ask her if she is willing to accept the telephone return interview. After each telephone interview, we will also make an appointment on the telephone for the next return visit to obtain the consent of the consumer. So our reputation in this area has been very good.

What other unique value-added services do you have?

Various value-added services will be prepared according to the needs of different mothers. For example, for parenting lectures, some parenting experts and education experts are hired to give speeches around the country, all of which are free. Four or five hundred people participated in the one just held in Shanghai; some parent-child activities are held from time to time, like children born in a certain month. The birthday party celebrating the first birthday, the baby crawling competition, etc., are all very warm and lovely scenes; I have also trained prenatal and postnatal health exercises, and asked the professors of the music school to give pointers on how to choose prenatal music music and so on.

None of these activities are expensive in terms of cost, but the feedback has been excellent. Now more than 90% of Chinese mothers are raising their first child and have no experience. What they want most is professional guidance, and Wyeth has given them the most desired service.

What other roles can CRM play in Wyeth's business in China?

In addition to segmenting the customer base, our CRM is a great help in various marketing and sales initiatives. At present, Wyeth has more than one million customer data, distributed in about 60 cities across the country. If the marketing department wants to launch a national campaign, it needs CRM to provide information on the distribution of customers around the world, how many customer groups are there for each product, how the performance of competing brands is, and so on. That way they know what to do with a campaign and whether it's the most effective way to do it.

Also, there is frequent feedback from a consumer that he cannot find Wyeth products in his city. If there are a lot of them, I will start to consider whether to sell the products to that city, and the service should follow at the same time.

On the other hand, CRM data can also help analyze the performance of certain departments. To give a simple example, the more than 1,000 promoters scattered across the country, the new customer information they get back, after we confirm the return visit, these data are directly related to the bonus distribution of promoters.

Therefore, CRM is closely related to the operation of Wyeth's entire company. With the continuous increase in the number of customers in recent years, our budget investment in CRM has increased by about 25% every year.

——Celine Wei

Yang Shengchao: Give customers what they want most

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