Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM is all about focusing on building good relationships with customers. It is key to developing a successful service where the customers are loyal to you and the organisation.

It involves all types of communication – it can be managing the sales, offering technical support to build good relationships or using marketing skills to get your messages across.

When you put the effort in to get to know your target market and customers on another level (and I don’t mean in a naughty way, but friendly yet professional) it enables you to develop strategies which will target their specific needs and requirements. By building a good working relationship with them will help you understand what your customer likes and dislikes, what kind of spending patterns they have – where they shop online, how much they purchase per month, their favourite items etc – so basically their buying habits!!!

Once you’ve established what type of customer they are, you can market specially to them – target them with offers and promotion designed specifically for them. Hopefully they’ll bite your hand off and sales will increase – This is how CRM supports marketing.

Here is an example of a business using a CRM system.

Local Florist

A husband uses a local florist to buy his wife flowers every year for her birthday. 

The local florist could use their CRM software to remind him a couple weeks before her birthday THAT HER BIRTHDAY IS COMING UP woohoo, either by an email or a phone call (preferably a phone call).

They could ask if he’s planning on buying some flowers again for his beloved wife and if so would he like the same bouquet as previously bought. Whether he would like them delivered or if he’d like to collect? Would he like to include a card and some choccys?

Happy customers, happy business

Services like this make a customer feel valued and important, why would they possibly go elsewhere? It’s like having their own personal assistant to remind them of the most important day of the year, THIS WIFES BIRTHDAY, but not forgetting anniversaries, mother’s day, valentine’s day and well…you know random days just to show her that’s she’s so so special and that she’s appreciated for everything she does like working, taking care of the kids, keeping the house clean etc etc etc (I MUST send this blog to my husband)