Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

How much do you know about your customers?

It sounds funny, but you probably don’t know enough. Some of my most recent consulting engagements have been centered on Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

This term has been around for years, and it can’t be defined well. The latest way to define this term is to build a 360 degree view of your customer. This means that you understand all aspects of your customer - and have access to this information as you work with your customer.

CRM 360 degree view includes any orders placed, any problems called in, any invoices sent, and any other information gathered during ANY interaction with the customer.

If you’re not doing so - you should find a way to log every customer touchpoint.

Here’s why: One customer called in with an order. The service agent handling the order managed the transaction, and went about their day.

The customer, however, was dissatisfied with “normal” treatment, and called back. The customer asked to speak to a supervisor, and informed the supervisor that they had purchased over $10,000 in materials in the last 2 weeks. 20% of their ordered materials had been damaged or defective, and they were placing a new order because when they reported the damaged goods, the rep handling the damaged goods claim couldn’t place an order for new goods.

Wow! How different would the phone call have been if the rep handling the order KNEW that this was a top customer, and KNEW that there was a problem with the previous shipment. Perhaps a discount or other relationship enhancement techniques could have been employed. Instead - the customer is left feeling unimportant.

Even if you’re not at a scale where you can afford a CRM system, start logging your customer interactions in a single place (Excel spreadsheet if you must). Bills, inbound calls, outbound telemarketing offers, mail/email solicitations are all contact points…and all of these should help you gain that 360 degree view of your customer.

Use this informaiton to make each one of your customers a special customer. You’ll be glad you did.

Posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under ProCore Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.