Pacific Coast Feather Co.: Targeting New Customers

Pacific Coast Feather Company is the largest basic bedding company in North America, doing about $300 million in business. Learn how the company is using SAP solutions to target a new customer base, streamline its ordering processes, and provide better service.

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    • Pacific Coast Feather Company is the largest basic bedding company in North America. We do about $300 million; basic bedding being pillows, comforters, mattress pads, that type of product. I think the interest stemmed from two areas. One is the ease of inter-connectivity to our mainframe system, our enterprise system which already was SAP. Parallel to that was obviously our IT department’s familiarity with SAP made that attractive as well. I think one of the significant appeals of SAP is that it was our enterprise system so we could easily and really automatically just connect right into that. So the process, that order process, flowed directly into our system, and there was no need for a lot of either intermediate technology or the need to design that bridge from what the CRM package was doing, what the order process and marketing front end was doing, with our enterprise system. So those orders flow directly into our system and flow from there. The specific opportunity we identified actually was on the business-to-business side. And in that case, what we were looking at was our small business customers doing business in the sort of traditional way, fax or even emailing purchase orders into us. We then handled them, recoded them into our system. Really cost-ineffective. The order size is so small and the margin so light that the cost to process the order almost makes it not worth it. At the same time, that customer segment is very attractive because it’s a large customer base, lots of diverse users. So from a strategic standpoint, we’re in a better position than in the case where we’re dealing with a few large customers. And so we very much wanted to go after that customer base, but did not really have a process that allowed us to do that profitably. And so we deployed the CRM really to get us that opportunity to target that customer in a way that we could then do the transactions in an efficient manner. SAP CRM has allowed us from a marketing standpoint and a customer standpoint to better service our customers, to provide greater convenience, lower our costs. The results have been immediate and really rather significant. Our initial sales were up 30% for no other reason than the site. We weren’t doing any incremental marketing; we hadn’t a sort of parallel path new marketing initiatives. As well as we’ve gained a significant amount of new customers. One of the great advantages of the CRM brought to the table was it actually improved the experience for the customer. I think that was one of our big concerns going into the application was how is the customer going to feel about us saying please don’t call, please don’t write. We want you to do all of this on this automated system here. It felt impersonal and limiting. The reaction exceeded our hopes to be honest in terms of the user experience and the advantages that they got out of it.
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