Keeping in Touch with Customers
CRM or customer relationship management. It's about keeping in touch with your customers. It is a tool to help you provide better customer service and sell more to your existing customers.
Keeping in touch with customers
It's much more difficult to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Keeping in touch with your customers whether that is by e mails, newsletters, telephone or regular visits keeps your company in their mind. This doesn't mean of course that you should be pestering them with telesales calls or spamming them constantly with e mails. Your contact should be well timed and appropriate to their needs. They will then value your e mails or telephone calls as useful and your company too.
Customer Service
Knowing what you have sold your customers enables you to provide a better level of service when they contact you. In addition it makes them feel valued that you remember. It also enables you to easily contact them in the case of product recalls or upgrades that they need to be aware of.
Sell More to Existing Customers
Knowing what your customers buy and when they buy it enables you to target your marketing. You have experience of this as a customer. For example the garage that you bought your car from may well contact you around the time they know it is due for a service or they think you will be in the market for another car. You can use your customer knowledge to contact them when they need you for a repeat order or to cross sell a related product.
The Basics of CRM
It can be as simple as an index card system or as complicated as a bespoke CRM system for your business but the basics remain the same. You need to be able to collect information, store it somewhere and access that information when you need it. If you have staff they need to be able to work with that system too.
Collect relevant information
There is no point in collecting and storing information you don't need. Think about the information that is relevant to your business relationship with your customer. This might be their contact details, what they have bought, when they bought it as a minimum. If for instance you are an aroma therapist you might also keep a note of their allergies, fragrance preferences and so on.
Store Information
You need somewhere to keep all this information and this has to suit the way you work. It's no good coming up with a system that requires you to spend an hour inputting the details of each sale when you are in a busy retail shop.
Access Information
You need to be able to get information out of your system easily in a form that you can use it. That might be on your computer screen as you take a telephone call or as a data file to create a mail merge to send out publicity material.
Before you set up your system think about what you might want to use the information for. This might mean that you need to group it in some way for example you might want to be able to call up a list of all your customers in a particular area of the country or all your customers who have a birthday in March.
If you can't get to what you want easily and quickly then you wasted your time collecting it in the first place.