Since it was established in 1901, Nordstrom's sales people have traditionally gone above and beyond the service of regular department stores by tracking customer information such as preferences for designers, sizes and last store visit. These sales representatives often proactively call customers to alert them to new shipments of their favored brand of dresses or shoes. However, to date all of this has been done using manual pencil and paper input.

Now, using the Clienteling and Relationship Marketing applications from Blue Martini's Retail CRM suite, more than 20,000 sales representatives in Nordstrom's 137 stores will be able to manage customer product information and preferences via new point-of-sale (POS) devices.

Blue Martin's Retailing CRM suite, released earlier this year in March, is comprised of nine applications that work with its customer engine. The suite integrates with leading merchandising, inventory management, fulfillment and supply chain management systems such as CommercialWare, Descartes, EXE Technologies, JDA, Manhattan Associates, The NSB Group, Retek and Yantra, as well as store systems from 360 Commerce, Chelsea, Cornell-Mayo, Fujitsu, IBM, NCR, Symbol, Triversity and Wincor Nixdorf.

Clienteling works by updating and automating the process by alerting Nordstrom salespeople at the POS when customer preferences match events such as new merchandise arrivals, in-store promotions, and alterations completion, Blue Martini officials said.

Jan Walsh, vice president of business information and technology at Nordstrom Stores, says that these new tools will enable sales people to enhance the already good service they deliver to customers.

By working at the POS, the tools focus on the particular pain point of the retail industry, which has been slower to adopt CRM than other business sectors. Because 98 percent of the transactions happen at the store, the information is gathered at the POS but not often pushed back there after being analyzed.