DotCom Mogul: Skeptical About CRM

Graeme Wood, one of Australia’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs fails to see what CRM could possibly do to improve his business. Mr. Wood is the founder and owner of Wotif.com, a web site that books accommodations for hotels, motels, apartments, resorts, guesthouses and bed & breakfasts in 36 countries. Recently, while speaking at a conference held by the CRM vendor Teradata, Mr. Wood told the attendees that while he is, indeed, trying to understand his users better, he had no plans to buy into a CRM solution. "The whole CRM thing,“ Wood said, ”this might sound like heresy, but I’m not convinced!“ He pointed out that there are at least one million Australian users of his web site and they have no data collected about any of them other than what was necessary to make their booking. "We don’t try and understand what sort of deodorant you’re likely to use," he said.

The Wotif web site tries to keep things as simple as possible for its users and does not ask for more details than are necessary for confirming a reservation. This bare-bones approach is, in effect, Wotif’s culture and it has been very successful for them which, Wood said, mitigated against acquiring a complex CRM solution. The paradox is that Wotif is, admittedly, interested in its customer’s behavior and to satisfy that curiosity they survey their customers to find out what they like and dislike. The information collected from such surveys, however, is treated as a sampling that can help the company spot obvious trends.

Woods went on to describe what he called a “conundrum” in his business: Customers don’t trust purveyors of Internet services with their personal information as they would trust “brick and mortar” institutions with that same information; people, it appears, want privacy, but they also want personalized service. For example, typical Wotif return customers do not want to have to provide a laundry list of their likes and dislikes every time they make a reservation — they want Wotif to have that information stored . . . but they absolutely don’t want it stored on the web site. With an attitude that sounds heretical to the devotee of CRM technology, Wood and Wotif have managed to succeed on a grand scale and Wotif will soon be issuing an IPO.