Got To Keep The Customer Satisfied ...

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday November 9, 2000

Bill Bennett

Knowing all about the most important people in your business has never been easier. By Bill Bennett.

Capturing and keeping customers is important to any business. At the big end of town they use a technique called CRM or customer relationship management. CRM is a fancy name for knowing what customers want, meeting those needs and nurturing relationships to find customers in the first place then keep them coming back.

People who work in CRM will have you believe it's a new idea. In fact it's something many small business operators have intuitively known how to do for

hundreds of years. Old-style keeping the customer satisfied was something of an art form, but modern CRM is definitely a science and technology plays an important role.

For example, my late grandfather was a greengrocer in London during the '60s. He could remember the tastes and buying habits of his best customers. When he could obtain, say, fresh peaches at a premium price, he loaded up his van with boxes at market, returned to the shop then got on the phone to let potential buyers know there was plenty of affordable juicy fruit in stock.

Grandad also made a point of remembering not only his customers' names and the way they liked to be addressed, but also key details about family members. This gave him an opportunity to chat and to sell extra items. If Suzy were expected home from university, he'd suggest a punnet of strawberries. A big family with winter colds? He'd suggest lemons or fresh Florida oranges. And so on.

To get the same effect many large companies and a number of smaller ones use complex programs running on powerful computers. Typically CRM systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are maintained by expensive specialist staff. They quickly grow into huge databases as intricate customer profiles are built. And, controversially, these databases can contain lots of personal information.

Despite being expensive, CRM systems often pay their way quite quickly. That's because finding new customers is expensive. An online retailer may spend as much as $100 to gain the attention of a single new customer. To justify the cost that customer either needs to make a large purchase or make many smaller purchases. CRM aims to give the seller a way to turn a one-off customer into repeat business. Not surprisingly sales of large-company CRM systems are growing fast. Depending on who you listen to, annual growth in this market is anywhere between 40 per cent and 70 per cent annually.

CRM doesn't have to be rocket science. There are relatively low cost, easy to use PC tools that can help smaller businesses perform similar tasks without specialist staff. We'll look at these in a moment. First, let's take a closer look at what large-scale CRM systems do.

Big-company CRM pulls together sales, customer service, marketing, field support and any other customer-focused functions. It is a mixture of processes and information technology. These days call centres and the Internet generally play an important role in CRM strategies.

Typically CRM systems identify where customers come from and what they are willing to buy. CRM systems might be linked to geographical databases so companies can work out where to locate business outlets. CRM data helps profile customers so marketing can be targeted more effectively.

At one end of the spectrum CRM provides the kind of information required to close a sale. At the other end it delivers the in-depth

decision-making information required to formulate company strategies.

Small business CRM is often more restricted in scope. This makes sense in a market where the CEO is often also the head of sales, marketing manager and customer complaints department.

For companies with a handful of staff, the data communication, storage and networking features are not so critical and there are generally fewer customers and less depth of information about them to deal with. Nevertheless, low-end CRM software can definitely improve your bottom line.

An entry-level CRM system is little more than a computerised address book with some capacity for recording additional customer data. Some of the more sophisticated desktop organisers or PIMs (personal information managers) can handle this task, though in a limited way. For example, Lotus's excellent Organizer 6.0 (sold as part of the $325 SmartSuite Millennium package) allows you to store fairly comprehensive customer information. Contact entries can be cross-referenced against text notes and a call database. It's also possible to link contacts with Web pages, to do reminders and diary entries.

Lotus Organizer isn't really aimed at even the lowest level of CRM activity, but it might be more than enough for a one-person business with basic CRM needs. You can find out more about Organizer at www.lotus.com

A little up the sophistication chain is ACT! 2000 (www.act.com), which sells for about $220 in Australia. Based on the old physical card index model, ACT! 2000 is like an electronic address book on steroids. The software allows you record a huge amount of data on each contact and you can scribble notes on each contact recording various calls, the results and schedule follow-ups.

ACT! links to your word processor and email software so you can mix email records with call data. What's more, you can use ACT! 2000 on a network so that sales people can share contact data. The best thing about ACT! is its beguiling ease of use. Sales people are rarely technical whizzes so simplicity is a must.

In the past I used ACT! with my handheld Apple Newton. Today the program is designed to work with a Palm computer, enabling portable access to data. In theory you can even access ACT! data with a mobile phone. ACT! has powerful search tools. Want to know who bought a Ford Mondeo in 1999? ACT! 2000 can tell you. Both ACT! and Organizer have map features that allow you to look up Internet street maps for customer addresses. Unfortunately Australian addresses just give you a map of the continent.

Maximizer, previously known as Tracker and sold in Australia by Multiactive (www.multiactive.com.au), moves a step closer to real CRM. Indeed, there are full-function corporate versions of the software. The low-end $350 Maximizer 5.0 is aimed at medium to large companies and used by organisations like the ANZ Bank. Maximizer 5.0 isn't easy to use, but it is powerful. I've not used the latest version, but I knew Tracker quite well and found it more than able to deal with a complex business.

The developers might say otherwise, but Goldmine, from Goldmine Software (www.frontrange.com) is Maximizer's closest competitor. At about $450 for a single user and $1,600 for a

five-user licence, it's the most expensive small business package in this round-up and also the most sophisticated. For example, it allows you to plan and manage complex sales campaigns. One feature I like in Goldmine is that the software can identify an incoming email and attach it to that contact's file record. I also like the way it shows sales, sorry, opportunities that are in the pipeline.

Goldmine and Maximizer are complex tools. You shouldn't expect to get them working overnight. In fact, I'd recommend you budget some extra money and have a professional set them up for your business. This may sound expensive, but it's probably the best IT investment a small,

sales-driven company could make.

Small is Beautiful

Weighing in at 1.6kg, Toshiba's $5,500 Portg 3480CT notebook computer is the supermodel of the portable computer world. Indeed, it is thinner than some fashion magazines - so slim you'd swear it isn't eating properly. Yet despite its tiny size it has a very readable 11.3 inch screen and its 600Mhz Pentium III processor gives it more brains than you'd find on the average catwalk. Encased in a tough magnesium shell, the 3480CT boasts special cooling technologies to prevent overheating.

AFFORDABLE COLOUR LASER

Inkjet printers are inexpensive to buy and more than adequate for most jobs, but if you print more than a few hundred pages a month, the cost of consumables is high. Colour laser printers cost more to purchase, but are less expensive to operate over the long haul. What's more they tend to print faster and crisper text than inkjets. At a shade under $5,000, Canon's CLBP400 laser printer is designed to deliver faster and better-looking print to small business users on a restricted budget. To save even more time and money, it comes with built-in intelligence that automatically switces between colour and monochrome modes.