Home » Business & Finance » Small Business » CRM - Customer Relationship Management

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

© Bert Markgraf

As a small business, you can't really call one of the large CRM system suppliers and ask them to put CRM in place in your company. Their products are geared to large, corporate clients who think they need to know everything about their customers and run huge databases to keep track of them. You don't need that. All you need is to keep track of the following for each customer:
- what have they bought;
- when did they make their purchases;
- how much were they charged;
- how much and when did they pay; and,
- possibly, how are they using your products.

The above information, which you can easily store in a simple database or even in a word processor or spreadsheet, will allow you to manage your relationships with your customers as far as delivering your products or services are concerned. It will let you check what the customer has in case there are warranty claims or if service is required; it will let you make sure your pricing is consistent; it will let you give customers with a good payment record credit or preferred pricing; and it will let you send your customers information on your products around the time they are likely to need new ones. If you do all that, you will be ahead of 95% of other companies, large or small.

What you don't need to collect, contrary to what the CRM companies will tell you, are the names of the spouse and children, their ages, their birthdays, anniversary, income bracket, kind of neighbourhood, recent holidays, favourite drink and the name of the dog. While the theory is that customers will respond favourably to salesmen who know these things, my own experience is that just as many customers want their suppliers to stick to supplying and find anything else intrusive. Not only that, but the customers who react negatively to intrusive information gathering tend to be the more desirable ones. Send them "Season's Greetings" at the end of the year but don't send their kids birthday cards or they won't talk with you anymore.

All over the Internet we are being asked to fill out forms with personal information. When we buy something we are asked for our phone number and/or postal code. When we order something we get questionnaires asking how we liked it. And a good part of this data collection is justified in the name of CRM. Yet, where is this CRM. As a consumer, I have yet to experience a successful execution. I would love to be e-mailed an attractive offer for exactly the car I want, just as I get ready to do the rounds of the dealers. Why doesn't someone send me a new package of envelopes just as I run out or fax paper or ink cartridges. I'd be willing to give them all kinds of personal information to help them do that. Instead, I get mountains of mass mailings for stuff I don't want.

The copyright of the article CRM - Customer Relationship Management in Small Business is owned by . Permission to republish CRM - Customer Relationship Management in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.