MyProjectTracker – The Blog

CRM is an important concept for us all and I believe the importance of it has been hidden under a load of jargon placed on it by software suppliers.

Customer Relationship Management a.k.a. CRM as a concept is geared very much towards the larger scale business and is misunderstood or worse, ignored, by smaller enterprises as a consequence. Software companies have made small fortunes creating CRM applications that deliver incredible insights into your customers to help you achieve both loyalty and sales. It is often through the software houses that we hear about the CRM space and what it means to business.

But what is CRM really? Does it apply to smaller companies and do you need software to do it?

In a nutshell, CRM is about finding out more about your customers and to utilise that information in a way to engender loyalty and increased sales. That’s it, nothing more or less.

Does this apply to your business and ours? Yes it certainly does! Every business wants to keep its customers and to increase sales.

This is the point at which people get nervous of CRM concepts as it starts to create thoughts/concepts of “change” and “investment” and “IT” and “time”.

Well it shouldn’t make us nervous and it most certainly doesn’t mean an enormous investment of capital and/or time.

The outputs of effective CRM practices are;

1. Loyalty.
2. Encouraging more sales.

Simply breaking it down to those two phrases certainly makes it easier on the eye as to what you are trying to achieve.
Think about your business – does this mean an expensive investment or is it simply making sure that you look after your customers correctly each time (deliver what you say, when you say and with a friendly face).

This delivers loyalty that will inevitably deliver greater sales as word of mouth is a very powerful tool – especially if you consider the amount of blogs, social networking sites etc on the internet that can be used as “word of mouth vehicles”.
It does not have to mean investing in high-end data mining and CRM analytical tools that are, for the most part, outside of the budget of most of us.

What it does mean is that we look at our operations to ensure they are geared to providing the best possible service to our customers along with the ability to identify and understand their needs.

Where can your operations improve to help better understand your customers needs?

Tags: business management, CRM, customer feedback, customer relationship management, customer service