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Making the most of customer relationships

Nov 25 2004

Small businesses are being encouraged to better understand their customers and Christmas could be a good time to start, says the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI).

DTI’s Roger Risely believes that many businesses are compiling databases of customer information to send Christmas cards to their customers. He advises that firms take this opportunity to use these to develop detailed information on their customers.

“Understanding your customer is vital to the success of your business and with the continuing development of technology there are ever more ways to achieve this,” says Risely.

With this in mind, as part of its Achieving Best Practice campaign, the DTI has launched a free publication and online resource on customer relationship management. These explain ways of collecting, storing and assessing information and how best to use this to market to customers and enhance the service they are given. It is broken down into a six-stage process:

Collect Customer surveys, recorded data from your website or online customer service (if you have one) or focus groups are ways to collect information with which to identify customers and analyse their behaviour

Store Buy a database that can comfortably hold all your data and has room to grow to adapt to future and is robust enough to handle multiple users and frequent use if necessary

Access Make the information available to all staff that need it and clean and update it to avoid out-of-date and inaccurate data

Analyse Use data mining tools to profile customers and develop sales strategies. There are Customer Relationship Management packages available that do this

Market Often a small proportion of customers generate the majority of a company’s profits. Targeting these customers with effective marketing can reap long-term rewards

Enhance Examine options for enhancing the customer experience and dealing with complaints quickly

To access the guides, click here or call 0870-150 2500.

(25/11/04)

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