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What is CRM?

CRM is about creating a single view of the customer, deepening your knowledge of them so that you can better meet their needs, and increase value for them.

Creating a single view means all interactions with a customer must be recorded and stored in the same place. Customers should be viewed not as a set of independent transactions but as a lifetime income stream.

Why should you think about CRM?

The main economic benefits include:

  • Retention – Acquisition is almost always more expensive than retention. By capturing and analysing as much information as possible on your customers you are able to better meet their needs increasing satisfaction and retention. Additionally by storing all interactions with a customer in one place you may be able to identify indicators that a customer is likely to churn, for example complaining in conjunction with a decrease in purchasing, and act to prevent this from happening.
  • Identification of your most valuable customers – By keeping tract of the recency, frequency, and monetary value of each customer you are easily able to identify those that are worth the most to you or will be worth the most to you in their lifetime and work to retain them. You could do this in a number of ways but for example you could ensure that they always get a fast response to complaints or enquires by having their emails/ phone calls jump to the front of the queue.
  • Increased opportunities to cross–sell and up-sell. The increase in stored information and single view of the customer you can gain when you implement CRM allows you to easily and quickly identify those customers that may be interested in complementary products or that are ready to move up to a premium version of the product. One way you could do this would be to look at customers that have already been cross-sold and up-sold and compare their characteristic with others in your database to predict those that are likely to be willing to cross-sell and up-sell.

  CRM software

Once you know what it is you want to achieve with CRM you can begin to look at the software that will help you to do it.

LANcom uses StayinFront CRM software to integrate all points of customer interaction (Sales, marketing, customer support). This software can be easily customised to fit an organisation’s information requirements. This software is business class. We have been able to build our entire business around it and we couldn’t run without it. Stayinfront CRM is designed from ground up to be customised so that although we have spent many tens of thousands of dollars to get it to fit the LANcom way like a glove it is easy to support and can be changed daily with virtually no downtime.

For more Economy class solutions to get you started you can try Microsoft’s CRM software Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0

If you are interest in setting up CRM software in your business contact us at info@lancom.co.nz