How can CRM help your SME
SME’s have long been able to out-compete larger businesses in terms of their personal contact with and knowledge of their customers, but there comes a point in the growth of a business where the level of personal contact starts to diminish as the number of clients grows. To address this problem and maintain the levels of contact and interaction which the customers have come to expect from your business, an SME can implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
The ethos of a CRM is to hold all information relevant to each customer in a centralised database which may be accessed by any part of your business. This data will make available, to anyone within your business who needs it, all the details for each of your customers, so regardless of whether they want to know about orders, service, updates, marketing or anything else, the database will share that information with those who need to know.
Information is vital for an SME to be able to provide a personalised service to each customer and to make the customer feel valued by your business, yet as SMEs grow it is one of the things which suffers if not handled carefully. If customers have to contact different departments within your business for separate services, it is easy to lose track of who they are and how their business benefits yours. Once that happens your customers can feel under-valued and become dissatisfied with their relationship with you.
Having centralised data stored in and accessed via a CRM means that any member of your staff can handle any question raised by any customer. It means that any of your salesmen can make the most appropriate offer to your customer. It means that any of your support team can offer guidance and advice about any problem which your customer may raise with you. It also means that you as management can make judgements based on your knowledge of your customers’ dealings with your business. How much is each customer worth to you in real income terms? How prompt are they in paying their invoices? How many hours support do they cost you each year? How many new customers have you gained through recommendations from each of your existing customers?
Having centrally accessed data means a more efficient service for your customers – they can speak to one person who can access everything they want to know. No need for them to be put on hold and transferred to another department, or have their email forwarded to the right person. No delays because the person who deals with that customer account is on holiday or off sick. Using a CRM also means it is possible for all contacts to be handled by a call centre or single point of contact rather than having each call routed through to each department to be dealt with, so this can result in cost savings to your business, as well as increased efficiency and maintaining those all-important excellent relationships with your customers.
This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web-based CRM software.
