The customer data is always right

Richard Bee, director at Sage CRM Solutions, assesses the benefits of customer relationship management technology for small firms.

Customers, don't you just love 'em? Yes, of course, and for any ambitious company, the more the merrier.

But therein lies the problem - as your customer numbers rise, how do you keep track of who you're selling to, what you're selling, how often and for how much?

For start-up enterprises, personal service is integral to everything the organisation does because it's those relationships that drive the business.

But there comes a point in any growing business where those relationships become increasingly difficult to manage as customer numbers increase, and/or the services your company offers becomes more complex.

That's where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology can help. Quite simply, CRM is a software programme that sits within your existing IT system that enables you to manage your business better across the scope of your operations, be it sales, marketing or customer service.

More specifically, CRM enables a manager to have an overview of his or her business that enables more effective and meaningful decisions. Here's how CRM can help in this:

Get to know your customers better

At a very basic level, think of CRM as a glorified filing system with wings. All transactions, sales, leads, notes, contacts, meetings, products, prices, services, dates, events and volumes can be logged, stored and filed through a CRM system. At the touch of a mouse, all the information on a particular customer - the last time they were spoken to, how much they spend, the average order size, specific issues affecting that business, their lead times - can be accessed by a member of staff. It's an enormously powerful sales tool to have your customer know that you are completely compliant with their requirements, that you know their business and that they know you will be able to deliver.

Get to know your staff better

One of the key advantages of a CRM system that gets overlooked is the insight it gives into your own employees, as well as the empowerment it gives to staff working within the organisation. Monitoring the sales, marketing and customer service functions enables a manager to analyse a company's "pain points" - those areas where perhaps the business needs bolstering in terms of staff requirements, or reducing, depending on the situation. CRM is also a way for staff to assess how they deal with customers and to have a valuable input into how the business is run.

Get to know your business better

The data that a CRM system produces can be a terrific tool in taking the pulse of your business. Be it logging the number of sales calls for a particular product to the demand for service calls for another, CRM can help you establish a snapshot of your enterprise that can then enable you to make those all-important decisions about where best to allocate your resources. Moreover, good data on your business will help you plan for the future. Who are your best customers? Who are the least profitable? Which areas of the business do they utilise? Should you spend more on marketing? Is your customer service expenditure worth it? CRM will arm a manager with the right kind of information to inform those decisions.

But, to deliver this it is important to remember one very important caveat: managers that buy and install it in the hope that the technology will solve all their problems. It won't. It can't.

CRM will bring you some knowledge and will most certainly save you time. But to really generate value - a company must become CRM-focused. Many CRM suppliers provide comprehensive support at the outset to advise users so that they can get the best from their CRM system and that way effect meaningful change within their businesses.

So how do you go about choosing the right CRM system for your business? You probably know my answer without me telling you! But seriously, there are dozens of magazines and web sites dedicated to product reviews, so that would be my starting point. Also, talk to other business managers and perhaps your local chamber of commerce. Finally, a chat with your local IT supplier might also be worthwhile. Quite often they will be a business partner for a particular CRM manufacturer and should be able to advise you from there.

But most of all, isn't it great to see your business grow? That's what CRM does - in spades.