Customer Relationship Management can mean different things to different people.
In simple terms, it is a means of collecting information about your contacts – customers, leads, prospects, competitors, suppliers – in a structured system which allows the information to be shared and used by different people and departments within your organisation. It could be called your “company memory”.
A new system, how it will work in your particular business and whether you can be sure it will do everything you want it to can be difficult to visualise. To overcome these concerns, you should ensure that you are able to see a prototype of the proposed system so that you can assess what your data will look like and how your processes work.
You can then be confident that when the system is installed, it will meet your objectives.
When implementing a new system, ensure that key people from all departments likely to use or be affected by the system are involved. By letting people have their say, they are more likely to welcome the new implementation and benefit from it immediately.
Follow these six simple tips to a better customer relationship management:
1 Minimise the levels of customer attrition by implementing strategies to keep in regular contact with customers. More than 50 per cent of customers switch suppliers because of “perceived indifference”;
2 Improve the effectiveness of marketing activities by improved targeting of potential clients for new business and existing clients for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities;
3 Obtain more new customers by refining the sales process, enabling more effective use of sales resources, reducing lead times between enquiry and order and higher conversion rates;
4 Simplify internal communications by providing an easily accessible database of all the communications and commitments (calls, letters, meetings, documents, for example) between the company and its contacts;
5 Make yours the consistent and reliable company that people want to do business with. Be confident that all the commitments you make are done on time, even when staff members leave, are off sick or on holiday;
6 Reduce administrative costs by simplifying routine administrative tasks such as producing letters, emails and faxes.
Implementing a system that will provide these benefits may sound an awesome, expensive and difficult task. Potentially it is, but RD Associates (MK) Ltd has extensive experience of implementing these systems for hundreds of clients both large and small.
This minimises the risk and costs to you, as well as the time it can take to implement a system.
For further information contact
Pam Mannell or Richard Dodds,
RD Associates (MK) Ltd, Cranfield Innovation Centre, University Way, Cranfield MK43 0BT. Tel: 01234 756011 e-mail: enquiries@rdassociates.co.uk
For more information, visit www.rdassociates.co.uk“
