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Christie’s Pushes Its Information Management in the Press

September 19, 2014 by Marion Maneker

 

Christie's App Tile

 

Steven Murphy’s impressive PR machine at Brunswick has pulled off another coup for him. The Financial Times offers a story about auction houses keeping up with advances in tech. The story itself doesn’t offer much revelation but it does put Murphy at the center of it.

Christie’s has created a CRM platform much like any bank or real estate sales operation to try to centralize (and control) client information better and not be at the mercy of a staff that may depart:

Christie’s now has James Map (as in founder James Christie), a sort of private internal social network that allows specialists, client service staff, support staff and executives to see what is known about a client and his tastes. Past auction records, relatives’ purchases and sales, statistical inferences on how likely clients are to move from buying an expensive watch online to participating in a high-end evening sale – it all can be in the mix.

The idea, Murphy explains, was “to create an internal app that spiders into our database of information and brings up on our internal [screen] environment lots of connectivity. This is faster and better than the email chains [that it replaced].”

Perhaps more interesting and significant is the way the company is trying to make it easier to get lower-value objects vetted by the right person:

Auction houses used to regard the sale of smaller, cheaper objects from, for example, estate liquidations as an annoying loss-leader business that just wasted their specialists’ time. Now, however, many are making money selling objects for $2,000-$3,000; it’s just a matter of cutting transaction costs. “We have a new app with which you can take a picture, push a button, and it goes to a specialist, with a description. Then the specialist can decide if it might fit into an auction,” says Citron.

Auction houses embracing digital technology to sell to the new global rich   (FT.com)

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