Customer Relationship Management

What is customer relationship management, and why is it important to UK Leaders?

Customer Relationship Management, or “CRM“, is the way a business goes about creating, maintaining or even sometimes repairing the relationship it has with its customers.

The customers are the vital life-blood of any modern organisation. Customer-centric product development is a decades-old concept, but lately several new aspects of companies have become potentially large growth area when the customer-focused principles and tools of CRM are applied to them.

One of the key pillars of CRM is collecting useful data about your customers in a way that does not damage the customer relationship itself. This is what I will discuss today.

How can I collect information about my customers?

Collecting information can be done in many different ways, with some being far more thorough, and others can happen without the customer even realising!

1. Creating customer accounts.

Online services and business2business organisations will already force new customers to ‘create an account’ to make their initial purchase. Doing so will allow you to easily collect some basic profile data on your customer and track all their purchases. This information can be used to create a demographic view of your current customers. If you currently allow customers to anonymously purchase from you, without giving up any information about themselves whatsoever, you are at a competitive disadvantage, and I would recommend you to try and implement an account-orientated point of sale model in the near future.

2. Generating email lists.

Many small and large businesses such as restaurants have recently realised that using email marketing is affordable, easy and impressively successful in attracting repeat customers to their businesses. Simple ‘Free drink if you join our mailing list’ offers are quickly taken up by customers, and this can lead to a positive and lengthy relationship with the customer through making good use of email marketing tools. Enticing offers such as money off coupons makes can be sent to these subscribers for an extremely low cost, and will be read with far more enthusiasm than expensive leaflets through the door. A combination of interesting and genuinely tempting deals in  the emails will lead to a surprising good retention rate. The success of money-saving emails such as that produced by MoneySavingExpert.com shows that customers won’t generally perceive it as spam if it offers them good value. Once a sizable email list has been built up – it can of course be part of a coordinated customer relationship management strategy.

3. Keeping it simple – Writing it down!

Several businesses, including fast food chains, actually have their employees key in to their till; the nationality and estimated age of each customer they serve. Just these two simple bits of anonymous data are perfect for analysing WHO is actually buying your product. Are your prices putting off young students? Does your brand draw in customers from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds? You will be able to find out the answer to these types of questions with only a few snippets of information.

Once the data has been collected – proper analysis can begin, which I may cover in a future blog post. Stay tuned!