Customer relationship management is more important now than
ever before. Easy for you to say, I bet you’re thinking, you work as a CRM
consultant! But the proof is all around. Research and business leader opinions
continue to remind us that customer experience focus is the key to business
success.
You might be reading this as one of an estimated 5.2 million
small businesses in the UK, and think that this type of drive doesn’t really
apply to your organisation. But no business, however small, can thrive without
customers!
I have seen a real change in the role that a CRM solution
can play inside an organisation over the years I have been working in this
industry. CRM used to be the domain of the sales force, and then the marketing
team joined in.
These days CRM is a valuable tool for the entire workforce,
ensuring the smooth transition of the customer journey throughout an
organisation.
It is so easy for customers to switch brand, find better
deals and more competitive offers, that the traditional differentiators (quality,
value) are no longer enough. Your organisation could have the best product, at
the best price, but unless you provide an excellent – and consistent – quality
of customer service, you could easily suffer with low retention.
What is still true throughout all the years I’ve worked with
small businesses is that it costs more to get a new customer than to keep an
existing customer. You must continuously strive not to let your hard earned, and
paying customers, slip out the back door because you are too focused on waving new
ones in through the front.
Even a simple CRM solution can be enough to provide
resilient tools for your work force to make sure that they are efficiently,
proactively and consistently communicating with, and delivering excellent
quality service to, your customer base at all times.
And with the information you gather into your CRM system you
are in a prime position to analyse and identify what works (and do more of it)
and what doesn’t (and stop).
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