Regular feature updates
Keeping you ahead of your peers
Focused on our customers

CRM Blog

Your Feedback Matters (But Only When It Suits Us?) - 6th August 2009

Customer relationship management relies on knowing what your customers are saying and thinking in relation to your company at all stages of the customer life-cycle. The use of this data helps your business target its communications more effectively and turn prospects into customers, and can also help retain existing customers for longer.

One of the most important forms of customer data used for keeping existing clients / customers happy is collecting their feedback. According to statistics, 95% of all businesses collect feedback. However:

Only 50% inform their staff of the feedback they’ve collected
Only 30% take any action on it
And only 5% take the time to inform customers of what action has been taken

This paints a rather underwhelming picture of businesses’ attitudes towards their customers’ opinions, and there is little excuse for this neglect when customer relationship management software is so readily available.

Training your customer service team to use a CRM package will allow them to telephone existing clients and record the findings of their conversations in a single place, as well as keep track of customer activity (i.e. When you last spoke to them, whether they have purchased anything recently etc.) over prolonged periods of time. This dedicated approach to customer care will collect valuable feedback that can in turn be used to:

Improve internal efficiencies in the business, reducing costs
Identify areas where sales might be being lost
Increase customer satisfaction and the length of life-cycles

Installing CRM alone will not make the feedback valuable – a change in company culture is necessary for action to be followed through on it – but it will make it easier and more methodical to collect, store it in a place where it can be accessed by those who need to see it, and encourage collaboration when trying to devise a solution. The end result? Feedback that matters to both clients and to you.

No-Fat Marketing: Plot Where Leads Come From With CRM – 22nd July 2009

Historically, the success of marketing hasn’t always been easy to quantify. Evidence of a campaign’s success was often boiled down to either a positive, negative or static trend. It was time-consuming to gather hard evidence whether ‘Customer A’ actually bought the washing-up powder because of the television campaign or for a completely unrelated reason.

Customer relationship management programmes can now help B2B businesses track the origins of incoming enquiries with greater ease, which in turn means greater measurement and analytic opportunities. You should train customer service agents to ask all incoming prospects, whether it be via phone, instant chat, email etc:

How they first heard about your company
What it was that prompted them to get in touch with you directly

Their responses should then be fed into the CRM program.

This data will help you understand which marketing efforts are most effective at promoting awareness of your company – the first step towards building trust in prospects - and identify which calls to action, special offers and promotions are best at driving prospects to get in contact with you.

This is solid, quantifiable data that can be used to sort underperforming marketing activities from the rest. In the lingering recession, most businesses cannot afford to waste any of their marketing spend; knowing which channels are not bringing a strong ROI will help marketing and senior managers decide which ones to improve and which ones to jettison altogether, saving the business more money and getting extra value out of customer service staff.

How CRM Refines Raw Data Into Results – 17th June 2009

Businesses are often sitting on a goldmine of data but don’t take the time to sort through it. This is counter-productive because many best practices, including how to speed-up the sales process and increase its effectiveness can be unearthed through such analysis.

The question is 'how?' With a customer relationship management, much of this data will already be stored in a raw format. Looking at the qualified leads logged into the CRM programme over the past 6 months can provide a good cross-section of data to measure. How many of these leads have been closed and what do these leads have in common?

CRM programmes can be used to keep a record of every interaction with a lead, including the date and time of follow-up contacts, who they were made by and what the result was. If you want to trial a new hard-offer to encourage sales conversions, measure how successful the strategy is over the next six months by comparing the number of deals closed when using it to the number of deals closed without it. What are prospects' reactions to it? Does it emerge as clear, successful practice?

This data will help you to compare and refine your strategies in an ongoing process. So not only will they gradually improve month-on-month and year-on-year, you can trial new offers in confidence knowing you have a solid-best practice strategy to fall back on if they don’t take off.

This knowledge is invaluable to businesses, and as a method is much cheaper than bringing in a business & sales consultant to teach you what you could potentially learn yourself. So ask yourself: 'What can we learn from our raw data, and how can we put it into practice?' An increase in efficiency and success rate of sales processes is there is waiting - if you’re prepared to dig for it.

Tapping Creativity and Hidden Talent in the Workplace – 4th June 2009

Customer relationship management (CRM) benefits more than just the customer. One of the additional advantages of implementing it in your organisation is how it enables sales, management and technical staff to share information through the business wiki.

In a way, you could think of the wiki as another form of social media: the wiki allows staff to share ideas and documents and work on them collaboratively in a virtual environment. This is similar in principle to the way friends on Facebook and other social networking sites share videos and messages, and as a concept it is especially useful for larger organisations or businesses with remote employees.

Because these people do not always get to interact with one another, big ideas can go unmentioned and untested. But by introducing the CRM Wiki to your business and giving staff a forum to communicate on the job, you could potentially unearth the next Bill Gates – or perhaps a little more modestly, a new sales technique that increases business revenue.

This idea of introducing wikis and other networks sometimes often meets with resistance because managers view them as a challenge to the typical closed & vertical business structure, or a vehicle for ‘time-wasting’. While we don’t encourage you to give your staff ‘carte blanche’ to run amok on social networking sites, we do think it’s unfair to suggest that staff would only ever use a wiki to avoid work.

Try to introduce a culture that incentivises constructive use of wikis rather than punishing procrastination. If staff see what’s in it for them, they’re more likely to have an enthusiastic response to sharing ideas and making the most of your investment trying to find out ways of making their jobs better. After all, you never know: given the chance to shine, there really could be another budding Bill Gates in your organisation.

Why Customer Service Has to Survive the Recession – 20th May 2009

Customers aren't always motivated solely by price; the perceived value of a good arguably has more influence on a buying decision. A positive customer service experience contributes massively to that sense of value. Before buying for the first time or making a repeat purchase, they will ask themselves, Has the service been:

Convenient?

Helpful?

Friendly?

If it hasn’t, and your offering has no other USP to fall back on, what’s to stop them trying one of your competitors?

Customer relationship management makes sure the right information for making the customer’s buying process easier is stored and accessible to the right people. For instance, returning customers might not expect account managers or sales staff to know them by sight, but if they are following up a query and your staff can’t locate the necessary information, your customer service reputation is going to take a knock.

Companies like Dell, Apple and Google were able to embark on more sophisticated customer relationship management programmes because they invested in technology during previous economic troughs when everyone else was cutting back. By the time the economy had recovered, they were leagues ahead in customer service.

If you want to be in a stronger position that your competitors in a year’s time, you have to start putting in the work now. Survey your customers; find out what they think about your current customer service offerings; identify areas for improvement and start filling in those gaps. The surest way to seal up any holes in your hull and stop losing customers through attrition and abandonment is to invest where others retrench: make customer service one of your investment priorities.

You Pick The Destination, CRM Will Show You The Way – 8th May 2009

You already know where you want to go; your destination is the front of customers’ minds. You’ve got most of the kit to get there: you’re already quite familiar with your target market’s age, gender, average income and geographic location (that is unless you happen to be a new business or are diversifying in unfamiliar directions); perhaps you even know what their highest form of media consumption is - but even with all this knowledge, are you sure you’re going about reaching them the right way?

An easy mistake to make is assuming that the most popular form of media consumption is automatically the best way to reach your target market. True, you want to be highly visible in whatever space most of your potential customers are congregating, and if it’s a social media site such as Facebook, so be it – your customers determine where you set your co-ordinates.

But it’s not as simple as going where the biggest crowd is. It would be counter-intuitive to neglect these spaces completely but you should turn to your customer relationship management program and do some analysis before jumping in with both feet first.

We’ve already seen that Facebook is a popular but notoriously difficult space to advertise in effectively. The large majority of social media users would prefer it to be an ‘advert free’ zone and resent the idea of companies invading it with profiles trying to be their friends. Rather than targeting a larger crowd of unreceptive prospects, it is better to target a smaller, more receptive one.

You could greatly increase your sales effectiveness by testing different marketing channels and analysing which generated the most sales enquiries and conversions using a customer relationship management reporting system. The most successful one might not be the one you’d automatically expect.

For instance, in a recent article on MyCustomer.com, it is reported that digital immigrants (people who grew up without technology but have learned to use it later in life) over the age of 55 consume 22% of overall mobile marketing share. Not only that, mobile marketing campaigns in the automotive, insurance, airline and credit card industries have been very successful amongst this age group - more so than online marketing.

What assumptions do you harbour about your target market? Could it be you’ve been approaching them from the wrong angle all this time? A CRM program can help you get to the bottom of things, uncovering the truth about which channel really gets results – based on actual results.

Three Ways Customer Relationship Management Can Make (and Save) You Money – 22nd April 2009

In a world where business applications are ten-a-penny, what makes customer relationship management programmes stand out?

Although CRM’s primary function is to streamline, organise and facilitate business operations, it is really a way of making and saving businesses money through increased targeting, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Here are the top three ways in which it could help your business:

Increased customer insight

Businesses tend to collect large amounts of data from customers but never do anything with it, often because it’s so disorganised. Customer relationship management programmes make it easy to store up-to-date information in one place.

If a marketer is allowed to analyse data from sales team interactions, they could identify emergent trends. Getting this insight from your own customers instead of second-hand reports has more value to your unique situation. Analysing this information will enable marketers to create campaigns that tap directly into customers’ desires to buy and = more sales.

Faster project completion

Co-ordinating groups of people both large and small can be hampered by delays and other unforeseen circumstances. Staff on leave, misplaced messages and different versions of documents leading to communication breakdowns....productivity can be crippled by these events.

Staff using customer relationship programmes in place will find it much easier to co-ordinate their efforts, giving them access to the most recent documents and messages even when working from remote locations. This will reduce product completion time and improve the quality of work produced and = cost savings.

Improved customer satisfaction / loyalty

People buy from people, not from companies. Equipping your sales staff with relevant information about a customer makes it easier for them to strike up a good working relationship, even if they haven’t spoken with them previously. Information such as dates of birth, previous products bought etc. can even present opportunities for up-selling related items or gift ideas and = even more sales.

Hopefully the cost and revenue advantages of using CRM in your business will be clearer now. When you are called upon to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI), you can use the above as reference points to help you calculate the appropriate metrics; all important in an economy where every pound spent has to be justified.

Could Software as a Service Save Your Customer Relationships? – 8th April 2009

Three months into the recession and it is likely your business is feeling the pinch to some extent, either directly or indirectly. These constraints could be budget cuts or customers less willing to part with their money. Either way, customer relationship management – cultivating leads into customers through monitoring their interactions with your company – will become both more urgent and difficult to undertake if kept in house.

What managers need from their customer relationship management programs is flexibility. This is where Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM programs have become a real boon to businesses. In a thought-provoking article for MyCustomer.com, Nancy Jamison writes, ‘the movement towards standards-based, open software solutions has made the integration of traditional contact centre and third-party applications a reality’ - meaning whatever size solution you need, there will be a customer relationship management program to fit.

The chief advantages are cost and flexibility based. SaaS customer relationship programs are traditionally charged on a cost-per-user basis, meaning that businesses are able to expand or contract the service as demand requires. It’s more time and cost-effective to let a third party provider do this because users are added to or subtracted from the existing platform easily. Managers also aren’t bought into software that depreciates over time and may not have enough people to justify running it.

SaaS also gives managers a greater flexibility to manage their roles and achieve results independently. It can be trusted to generate useful reports and facilitate a systematic lead generation process for sales staff without micromanagement, so managers have more time to spend on strategic decision making.

How are you currently using customer relationship management? Is your approach really flexible enough to meet the current economic demands, or is it time for you to migrate to a third party SaaS solution? To find out more about how it can help your business, please read our white paper, ‘Seven Secrets to CRM Success’ by clicking here.

Sales Teams Under Greater Pressure to Perform – 25th March 2009

Could you be doing more to help your sales teams reach their targets? The 15th Annual Sales Optimisation Study by CSO Insight has shown that less than 59% of all sales reps met their targets in 2008, while 95% of all firms are expecting their sales teams to close more business. In order for sales teams to meet these higher expectations, it is necessary to look at the obstacles that are preventing them from meeting their targets now.

Inefficiencies and inaccuracies in communications with prospects are two of the commonest flaws of the sales process – but these are quite basic problems easily solved by making the most of customer relationship management (CRM) programs. Where CRM really comes in to its own is in helping sales staff to up-sell and cross-sell products and services based on contact data stored in the CRM program. By analysing customers' sales histories, it is possible to target them with relevant promotional messages and calls. These are more likely to be received favourably and help notch up sales staff's overall figures.

Research shows it is much cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one; where trust has already been established with previous customers, sales teams should be analysing these opportunities and looking for ways in which they can add value to them. This will put them on the road to success into 2010.

CRM's Key to the Future Through Customer Insight – 11th March 2009

In a speech delivered at the Gartner CRM summit in London, Gartner Fellow, Mark Raskino commented, ‘In the last recession you can see companies that made mistakes by sticking with data they had.’ He went on to insist that companies be on constant lookout for growth opportunities and ways of repositioning themselves in order survive; a window into the future is through your customers.

The point that underpinned this talk was: it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a company to go on making the same assumptions and expect to survive; either the market changes or competitors shift the goalposts for them. As Raskino asks, ‘What is the new normal?’ In order to stay in touch with the market place, your business has to be able to answer that.

It is easier for businesses to identify insightful trends within their own customer base when they use customer relationship management (CRM) programs: it can tell them who is buying what; how much they are spending and where the new customers coming from. The more information you collect on your customers, the more reliable their behavioural data becomes, creating a clearer picture for you to plan the year ahead around.

You can predict more accurately what the next emergent market for your business will be when you combine your CRM data with other insights into the wider marketplace – as Raskino points out, not every industry is shrinking; the recession can even throw open opportunities of its own for you. Businesses that are able to tap into their customers’ behavioural changes will be able to find ways of making it pay. What changes have you been noticing in your customers, and how can you turn it to your advantage? Look at your CRM data and start viewing it as an asset, not just as a commodity.

Create Advocacy and Increase Referrals Using CRM - 25th February 2009

Is it possible to do PR and marketing for free? When fully-utilised, a customer relationship management program can help identify customers who are likeliest to become advocates of your brand based on how much they spend, how often they spend and for how long they've been buying from the company. These people won't expect payment for their services, and the amount you'll need to invest will be nominal in comparison to the potential returns.

The problem most marketers face in a recession is marketing budgets shrink and as a result, public relations efforts can take a hit too. In the old business model, a decrease in advertising and a dip in customer spend was unavoidable; now with social networks, interactive e-commerce sites and web forums, word of mouth is an advocacy channel with global reach. With this in mind, you should be focusing your efforts on cultivating loyalty and advocacy in your most profitable customers.

People buy on the strength of recommendations from trustworthy sources. 50% of consumers have stated that a lack of trust is a chief barrier to making a purchase. With consumers becoming more concerned over their spending, this is having even more of an impact on sales figures.

Combat this by targeting those customers who are most loyal with special communications and offers that drive home how valuable they are to you. Do this consistently and they will spread goodwill and positive feedback over their communication networks, which will be picked up by other people (the same principles apply to both B2B and B2C markets). Then when referrals are coming in on the strength of word of mouth, cuts in the marketing budget will feel like less of a handicap.

Take care not to neglect the rest of your customer base though; you should be transparent about your reward schemes and what customers can do to benefit from it, otherwise you risk losing customers who feel as though they are being unfairly ignored. Develop reward schemes and email campaigns that reflect the level of business you are receiving from them and send notifications if they have achieved a higher band of 'loyalty'.

Advocacy can never come too soon so kick start it today by rewarding your most loyal customers. Take a look at your customer / client list and create a VIP list: these are the people who will help carry your brand through difficult times simply on virtue of their liking and talking about your products and services.

What's in a Name? Customer Relationship Management and 'PRM' – 11th February 2009

Businesses need to start looking at their CRM programs and think about prospect relationship management (PRM) as an additional activity to the relationship tactics used on existing customers.

The processes for keeping existing customers and acquiring new ones are very different. It all boils down to the central issue of trust: convincing a prospect that you're worth their time and money in the first place is a difficult task – especially in a recession economy. Those working with existing customers need only to maintain and build upon that existing trust (not to suggest that is any less important!)

To gain that trust, you must make your prospects feel special, and the quickest way to do that is to address them as individuals. Your data capture system could be greatly improved by asking for the contact's name when they sign-up for a free promotion or newsletter. After all, nothing feels more impersonal than an email communication beginning, 'Dear joebloggs@gmail.com'. From then on, it's a case of encouraging prospects to give you all the information you need to help you segment them into more specific groupings.

As the prospect is nurtured with successive newsletters, notifications and soft-offers, customer service and relationship management staff should use predictive analysis on the list to identify those leads most likely to make a purchase and become long-term customers. This information would be based on their responses to the various soft-offers you pitch them. Segmenting those most likely to purchase means that you can build a high-quality list on which to focus your time.

Remember: it's not necessarily the size of your contact list that matters, it's the quality. Marketing to the right 500 people is more cost-effective than the wrong 5,000. To minimise overall time and financial costs associated with acquiring new customers, you have to spend a little time examining your list and putting money on the safest-bets. Once the economy is on the up again, you'll have a solid foundation of loyal, existing customers and a steady revenue stream to build upon.

Collect and Implement Feedback Effectively With Customer Relationship Management - 28th January 2009

Analytics firm, Gartner have found that feedback gathered from consumers immediately after an event is on average 40% more accurate than feedback gathered 24 hours later. Their reflections on your products and services could provide invaluable information on how to improve them and a customer relationship management (CRM) program would give you an accessible, functional place to store and analyse it.

At SprintCRM.com, we believe high customer satisfaction is what will give businesses a leading-edge over their competitors during the recession and those with the highest customer service standards are likelier to have the lowest customer attrition levels.

There are many opportunities to collect feedback from engaged consumers. Think of how many people call your customer service number, send an enquiry via email or complete a transaction on-line at your ecommerce site. With a bit of technical wizardry, you can arrange to set up:

2-3 minute customer satisfaction phone surveys conducted by automated agents (to avoid the bias of a human agent)
Links in emails from your customer service team directing respondents to an on-line survey page
An optional page on your ecommerce site asking users for feedback directly after leaving the checkout

To get the most out of these surveys, keep the questions simple and on-topic. Outline your objectives - e.g. 'To identify areas in the ecommerce site that need improving' - and ask questions relevant to those objectives only. Employ scales of 1-10 (or 1-9 in the case of automated telephone surveys) and keep the question responses closed rather than-open ended. The key is to have information that's easy to analyse in the CRM program at a later date.

By analysing and responding to customer and client feedback, you will improve your overall customer service levels and foster increased loyalty from your clients. That way, you can ensure that when competitors try to poach your customers, your customers are convinced they are already using the best option available on the market.

Creating a CRM-Supportive Business Culture - 21st January 2009

It's the start of a new year; you want to increase the volume of sales conversions and improve the working relationships of your staff with customers and other staff members, and CRM seems the best way to do it. However, you're unsure whether your current business culture can support it.

Getting the most out of customer relationship management requires a degree of commitment on every level, so here at SprintCRM we've come up with some advice on how to create an environment that will nurture the use of CRM, resulting in increased profitability and productivity for your business in 2009.

View CRM as More Than Just Technology

A CRM application isn't just an add-on to your existing sales process; it's a way of collecting and storing data that can be used later on in the sales process to make the final sales conversion easier and to retain customers in the long run. Ultimately though, adoption of a CRM program should reflect a willingness to embrace change; analysing the results of your existing sales processes and testing these against new methods should reveal areas for improvement.

Take Time to Familiarise Staff with the Program

To avoid the CRM program being viewed by the sales teams as just another piece of bureaucracy, brief them fully on the advantages of using customer relationship management:

Faster sales conversion rates with methodical sales / follow-up processes Improved relationships between sales teams and customers using accurate customer data Increased customer retention as a result of improved working relationships

It's doubly important that staff are aware of all the relevant features of the CRM program so they can get the most out of it: taking advantage of automated reminders means they are less likely to forget important appointments or follow-ups. Also, being familiar with the terminology and knowing what is expected of the CRM program will ensure they enter the correct data, which will improve accuracy levels at the reporting stages later on.

Get Everyone On-Board

Customer relationship management programs aren't just about improving the cycle of information between sales teams and prospects; they're also great collaborative tools that can be shared by everyone in the company. They aid the flow of information between different teams with on-line document storage, calendars, automated reminders and wikis, resulting in greater efficiency, fewer missed deadlines, better transfers of ideas and a clear shared vision.

For the CRM program to reach its full potential, get everyone on-board in support of it. This will be easier when staff see the benefits of using the program, and this in turn will help the business culture flourish thanks to the greater sense of community it brings. Remember: small changes bring into effect larger ones, so doing a little bit of ground work now will help make the take-up smoother later.

Service-Comparison Sites Up The Customer Service Stakes - 10th December 2008

The rise of the 'i' economy, with internet users wielding significant power in the construction (and potentially deconstruction) of consumers' perceptions of brand image, is likely to force businesses into working harder at improving their customer service provision levels.

With the advent of Web 2.0, there are now more portals for consumers to make their voices heard than ever before: micro-blogging sites like Twitter, social network groups, blogs, forums, review sites – the content on all of these contributes to the general perception of a brand in the buying public's eyes. It's near impossible to suppress bad press and negative feedback once it leaks onto the internet and companies have very little power to manipulate things in their favour, save for going to the root of the problem and exceeding customer service expectations.

It's now the clients and consumers who are in control of content, not the companies, hence the term, 'i' economy: the business world is being forced to abandon the old 'top-down' model where businesses could simply broadcast their customer service message using traditional advertising channels - TV, print and radio - without potentially facing a very public discussion on the merits of such a claim. Web 2.0 has changed that.

Customer service has always been a popular talking point and the opportunity to praise or complain about a company on-line has been taken up by consumers with enthusiasm. Now the stakes are being upped another notch with service comparison sites such as Plebble.com encouraging users to contrast their customer service experiences with that of other users – another feather in the consumer's bow.

With comparison sites now dedicated to particular industries like broadband connections and utilities, customer service feedback is becoming more specialised; those on the consumer/client side are gaining more qualitative criteria – customer feedback – on which to judge businesses. With the economy in a tail-spin, customer service could feasibly make or break companies' fortunes in 2009 but it remains to be seen how, or even whether businesses will rise to the customer service challenges they face.

CRM Plays Vital Role in Private Sector Too – 27th November 2008

We've already written a little bit previously about how CRM is helping to improve customer service levels in public sector call centres, but now some new information has come to light showing the importance of effective CRM in the private sector too.

Statistics show that 64% of consumers who've rung a call centre with an on-line transactional query didn't feel as though the agent knew enough about the website to help them in an efficient and timely manner, and that a total of 38% of consumers ended the call without coming to a satisfactory conclusion i.e. sale abandonment.

Assuming that the customer doesn't give up on an on-line sale when they have a technical problem, there's still chance to recover their trust by providing a professional and informative support helpline. That's why it's important that call centre staff are well-trained on how to troubleshoot technical problems with the website, and that copies of troubleshooting documents are hosted using a trusted CRM program for them to read.

No part of the business can be expected to survive in isolation: the call centre, like a central nervous system, has to have links to every department. Contact agents should have access to all the information they need to do their job properly. Otherwise, customers are more likely to abandon the sale and walk away empty handed - in the direction of one of the competition.

Public Sector Lagging Behind in Process Planning - 12th November 2008

A recent report from the Professional Planning Forum has shown the public sector is making great strides towards improving efficiency in its call centres but that there's still a lot of work to be done yet.

The public sector is outperforming the private sector in identifying customer service problems and opportunities for process improvement, as well as in the frequency and clarity of its management performance measurements. The need to represent government-funded bodies in a good light with even better customer service has driven call centres to respond quickly to these problems.

However, the main stumbling block faced by the public sector (and to a lessor extend the private sector) towards achieving optimum call centre efficiency is an inconsistent approach to process planning. Identifying and removing the root causes of problems encountered by call centres both internally and externally will ultimately save them time and money, and improve the levels of customer service they provide to the public.

Using CRM software is an effective way of installing standardised practices into all kinds of business environments. Call centres could really benefit from the provision of and ease of access to shared knowledge. Most CRM programs come with a facility for storing documents, which could include guidelines to help agents deal with complaints, and troubleshooters to help them answer the most common queries quickly.

Furthermore, the use of a CRM program would assist greatly in maintaining consistent records on ongoing complaints, allowing contact centre agents to update a contact's record after every phone call with details of when the call was taken, by whom, what was said and what action now needs to be taken.

Measures such as these should help call centres in both sectors to streamline their processes and become much more responsive, not only to the changing needs of customers but to changes in internal and external environments as well.

CRM Can Be Used to Create 'Market Insight' - 29th October 2008

When people mention 'customer relationship management', it's normally in reference to a service-based philosophy and maintaining close and relevant working relationships with clients, but what most organisations overlook is how it can be used for more than just keeping existing clients happy and getting others to climb aboard.

One of the most under-utilised benefits of having a CRM program in place is the amount of data it collects. Too many businesses aren't taking full advantage of this resource at their disposal: after all, data is just data unless it's put to some useful purpose. But combined with your knowledge of external market forces and other larger factors, the information you have about your customers – their purchasing habits, socio-economic indicators, location etc. - could be used to direct your business' expansion plans.

This is part of the process of gaining market insight, 'insight' defined as: knowledge that is yours alone and can't be put into practice by anyone else in the industry within the normal business cycle.

Businesses can end up paying through the nose for this kind of information when it's supplied by industry analysts but it's really quite easy to create on your own. Experts on market insight, Dr. Brian Smith & Dr. Paul Raspin demonstrate how in an extract from their new book, Creating Market Insight: How Firms Create Value from Market Understanding. You can read the extract here on MyCustomer.com, which will take you through some useful examples of how Tesco and Sky have created and benefited from their own marketing insight.

A CRM program is a database of information and how you use that information is up to you: it can be employed to speed the conversion process or create marketing success reports. But unless it's tied to a wider marketing and business strategy, it will never get to demonstrate its full potential. As the excerpt from Dr. Smith & Dr. Raspin concludes:

“Only when information is contextualised and synthesised with other information does it become knowledge. And only some of that knowledge has the properties of value, rarity, inimitability and organisational usefulness that constitute true insight.” True insight is what will help your business survive and grow in the marketplace.

Senior Decision Makers Shirk Contact Data Duties - 8th October 2008

Maintaining accurate contact data is one of the most basic things a business can do to ensure success - so why aren't more senior decision makers and board members taking it seriously?

A recent study by Experion, entitled 'Contact Data: Neglected Asset Seeks Responsible Owner' revealed some shocking statistics: even though 23% of respondents said they use contact data on a frequent, day-to-day basis, only 50% had a member of staff responsible for monitoring data quality at board level. This has had a detrimental effect on business culture lower down in the chain of command, with a mere 52% of employees estimated to have bought into the importance of data quality.

It's a well-known fact that customers stop paying attention when they feel their needs aren't being listened to and addressed. Worse still, think of the business communication that will have been misdirected through something as easily-rectifiable as a misspelt email address. Until senior management begins to take responsibility for data quality and transmit the message to the rest of the organization, outbound communications will suffer and business will be lost.

It isn't all bad news - there have been improvements in the number of people taking contact data seriously: a 16% increase in board level responsibility and a 5% increase at employee level since 2005. Still, It's a small percentage growth for a period of almost three years - clearly, there is much more work to be done before businesses claim to genuinely pay attention to their customers.

Banks Use CRM to Improve Service Standards - 24th September 2008

When was the last time anyone saw a mortgage lender smile?

There's not been much in the way of good financial news of late so that's understandable - but the impersonal, unfriendly facade of banks hints at a deeper problem rooted in business culture.

It seems financial institutions have been failing to fully satisfy their customers. The Banking Code Standards Board reported a rise of almost 50% in the number of complaints in 2005. More recent reports from GI Insight and EFMA have shown that the financial sector as a whole still isn't taking full advantage of CRM's acquisition and retention possibilities. Services are product-lead and don't take account of customer desires or needs.

However, the reports also showed that some banks have begun to implement elements of CRM into their front-end business and are making better usage of email marketing's capabilities. While this might not reflect a sea change in standard practice, it does show that banks are finally starting to realise the extent of CRM's effectiveness when it comes to strategic targeting.

With SprintCRM it's possible to keep track of clients' needs and purchasing habits - whether you're in the financial sector or not. This is vital for targeting contacts with the right message and keeping them as loyal customers. SprintCRM can also help target potential customers at the lead stage, enticing them away from competitors with better offers.

You can inspire confidence simply by listening. This care-led approach will give you that elusive edge during the highly competitive credit crunch.of banks hints at a deeper problem rooted in business culture.

It seems financial insitutions have been failing to fully satisfy their customers. The Banking Code Stadards Board reported a rise of almost 50% in the number of complaints in 2005. More recent reports from GI Insight and EFMA have shown that the financial sector as a whole still isn't taking full advantage of CRM's acquisition and retention possibilities. Services are product-lead and don't take account of customer desires or needs.

You can inspire confidence simply by listening. This care-led approach will give you that elusive edge during the highly competitive credit crunch.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 06 August 2009 )