Smart Marketing: Take sales to a higher level

KEEPING CUSTOMERS: CRM software allows you to track customer interactions as well as store a host of easily accessible information. PICTURE / RUSSELL SMITH

Customers are the lifeblood of your business.

Identifying, acquiring and retaining them is key to business success and the world of IT stepped in with software designed to streamline that process.

Customer Relationships Management (CRM) software provides a single centralised view of the customer via your computer. However, although CRM is sold by software companies, its use needs to be deployed across a company, not just in the IT department. It's designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by concreting customer loyalty.

For example, imagine if the email you sent to the mobile mortgage manager was kept on file and the customer service representative you spoke to three months later had every word at her fingertips. Chances are you'd be impressed. If that email was about a new product that had since come online, the chances for upselling that product would be greatly increased.

A good CRM package can do much more - creating a trail from documents, to emails to contact information so at a glance you can track all of your customer interactions as well as store a host of easily accessible information. What's more, it can often interact with your accounting packages.

At the top end, companies such as Siebel provide CRM to corporations. Small business CRM packages are priced from a few hundred dollars and include Microsoft Small Business CRM, Goldmine, ACT!, Maximizer, and Salesforce.com.

Wellington-based financial planner Creating Wealth uses Goldmine and can call up a trail of every email, letter and other correspondence sent to a client. That's helpful when a client complains that communication has not been good enough, says business owner Richard Renfrew. "On a more positive note we can use CRM to keep track of customers' life stages in order to market appropriate products to them at the right time to fit their needs."

Types of information that can be stored and utilised using CRM include: 
* Responses to campaigns 
* Sales and purchase data
* Shipping dates 
* Account information 
* Web registration data 
* Service and support records 
* Demographic data

CRM hasn't been without its problems. Many companies have spent thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on systems that simply didn't work. That may be no fault of the software itself. Typically the solution was the brainchild of a techie or the IT department and others in the organisation saw it as their domain. For it to work, businesses must understand what they want to do with their software.

The mistake is thinking about CRM in technological terms. It is a process that brings pieces of information together. The hardest thing is not installing the software: it's convincing staff to use it.