Bloggertone » Management » Customer Loyalty – It’s all about CRM

Customer Loyalty – It’s all about CRM

by Barney Austen on March 18th, 2010 | Comments


A quick definition!

  • CRM = Customer Relationship Management for customer measurement (software house speak)
  • CRM = attracting and looking after your customers for greater loyalty and profitability(business speak).

I know which I prefer! Smaller businesses can be scared away by big company speak, but CRM is too important a concept for us to ignore.

The key parts!

You satisfy a customer need. Your “CRM” starts before you have even one customer engaged.

The purchasing experience will dictate and determine the future loyalty of that customer. Were they satisfied? Will they give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down on their network?

  • Browsing -The customer has entered your shop, your e-commerce site, your marketing site, your magazine article… whatever their first contact with your organisation happens to be. Examine how you are presenting yourselves to your target base, is it as optimised as you can make to ensure customer engagement and capture?
  • Committing to purchase – the customer has indicated to you that they are interested in purchasing your offering. Have you made this decision process an easy one for them?
  • The purchase – as simple as possible and delivered in as friendly a way. Did the assistant look grumpy or happy? You want your customer to leave your sales point with a good vibe – this will enhance their enjoyment of the product/service offered.
  • Quality -  Did it meet/exceed expectation? Were your customers happy? Did you ask them?

Ok, it appears that I am simply talking about good customer service, but this equates to customer experience and this, in turn, creates loyalty and better sales i.e. the CRM end-game.

“How do I get customer data for my CRM process?”

If you have a system that can capture some of that information for future use, great but it is not mandatory. For many smaller businesses, particularly those that have personal interaction with their customers, the CRM tool is the personal understanding of that customer that is held by the sales man, owner or retail assistant. On-line, your google analytics will tell you how you are doing and where you need to focus.

Often, the interpersonal relationship creates an innate understanding of your customer through the interactions you engage in with the. The trick is to make sure that your business acts on that understanding to engender loyalty.

Embrace the concepts of CRM. Look at your business and see how the concepts can be applied to give you and your customers benefit. In the incredibly tough market, you neglect CRM at your peril.

Don’t fear the language that is used to sell software to big business, understand its message and apply it to your business.

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The Author: Barney Austen

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  • frankbradley
    CRM certainly seems to be making a comeback these days. I've recently started hearing more about the term Social CRM, and I noticed that Accenture are really starting to push this concept - obviously with a few to getting more consultants off the bench.

    It will be interesting to see if the application of Social Media to CRM will help create a resurgence in this field.
  • Excellent article on CRM. I'd like to relate a story that happened to me recently, and truly illustrates how CRM is important for all organizations:

    I am the president of a local Toastmasters club, and we just held an Open House, which we managed using online tools. We are lucky that we made that decision. We publicized the event using social media as well as traditional media. A week out from the Open House, we were most of the way to filling the room, then success/disaster struck. We landed on the front page of the local newspaper. Within a few hours we were sold out. By the day of the event, we had as many people on the wait list as we could fit into the room.

    Can you imagine the CRM experience if we hadn't managed the event by issuing tickets? We would have had 280 people show up to attend an event in a room that held 140. As it was, we were able to collect everyone's data (we used eventbrite.com) and contacted ticket holders to remind them close to the date and to ask that they let us know if they couldn't make it. We let them know that the wait list was long, and that we wanted to offer their seat to someone else, if they couldn't attend.

    20 people contacted us to release their seats, which was surprising, and our no show rate was below 5%. (Astounding for a free event). We were also able to move some of the wait list people to another event the following night, and are working to book another night for the remaining people.

    We also used the tool to contact the wait list people and let them know that they haven't been forgotten, that we are working on an event just for them, and to invite them to our next meeting.

    CRM isn't just for businesses, it is for not for profits too!

    If you offer seminars as part of your business, you may wish to look at eventbrite as a tool. It was quick and easy for us to use, and was a no cost tool, as we weren't charging for our event. We now have a contact list, loaded with 280 names for future events. It was well worth the few minutes it took to learn the tool and use it, and it's use created a positive "customer experience" where we could have had a disaster.

    [I have no business relationship with eventbrite, it just worked well for us.]
  • Hi Barney. Good to see your take on CRM. I agree that it's all about that relationship with your customers. We've scratched our own itch in this area and launched our CRM app yesterday http://www.onepagecrm.com/ . Would love to get your comments/feedback on it, since you have an active interest in such systems. I've tried to make it 100% customer-centric.
  • Customer Loyalty - my manager talked about this very often back in my working days. I agree with Niall, many have misunderstood the main concept of CRM but focusing more on the tools they're supposed to be using. I love the idea of a spreadsheet, simple yet effective. It doesn't have to be a costly app if we know how to use our limited resources. Another good article, Barney. A prolific writer you are. :)

    @wchingya
    Social/Blogging Tracker
  • Thanks for the feedback and reading :)
  • gregfry
    Great post Barney,

    I often find people shy away from CRMs for two reasons - 1. They have a perception that is costly and 2. They do not understand what CRM is and therefore feel it is not relevant for their business.

    I myself could be with a shake up when it comes to managing my own database. At present I am using zoho.com. What other CRM companies would you recommend for small businesses?
  • Zoho is one of the better one's actually :). There are others out there - but the reality is to use what works for you. Whether that's a notebook (clunky, but it can work!), a spreadsheet or whatever. The key is to make sure you capture the customer feedback and sentiment in a way that you can then use to develop your business. Thanks for reading.
  • gregfry
    Thanks for the speedy response Barney.
  • Hey Barney, congrats! another spanking #SugarTone entry - you are a busy bee :-) I am often asked to advise about CRM, for me CRM is about having information that makes having the relationship with customers/prospects better/easier. All too often, CRM is seen as as administration tool/task and this misses the point of what it was meant to do. By the way, there are some cool things happening around social CRM, it's a space carries big potential in my opinion. Great read! Niall
  • paulmullan
    Nice post Barney - CRM is essential for all business. Easy to work the customers you know and who know you that target new biz.

    Had a interesting conversation with my mechanics wife a few months back as she managed all non technical stuff for the biz. She was talking about the high cost of advertsing in a local publication. I asked her if she had a database of all existing customers who had used the service to which she replied no. Crazy that orgs still chase new business when managing existing business is much easier.

    P
  • Agree totally Paul. She understood her customer but that is no good unless you capture that somewhere and use it appropriately to develop the business. Thanks for reading.
  • Great points Barney. In our case we started using for instance on-deman CRM two years ago but mainly because our customer database had to be somewhere. In this case, the need to have a secure database was not letting us see all the other 100 useful things that you can do with your CRM. We have explored them gradually. Still trying to understand better use of CRMs.
  • Hi. Thanks for reading Fred. I would suggest that alot of the time, people buy the technology without really understanding what they want to do with the information. Glad to see you have the former sorted and are working out what to do with the latter :)
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