Forget The Software, First You Gotta Think CRM

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• June-July 2007 Issue
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To experience customer service off the charts you need only to visit Connecticut-based Mitchells and Richards clothing store (www.mitchellsonline.com) where CEO Jack Mitchell promises services “Over the Top.”

For customers, this has meant a Sales Associate providing the coat off their back if it was needed for a trip; or a house call to help with a bowtie for an important event. Mitchell calls it a “people matter” atmosphere, and the stores achieve it best by really “knowing the customer.” Mitchells/Richards keeps all the customer data in a database, tracking everything from clothing tastes and sizes to nicknames, family members, favorite foods and birthdays. Some information comes from the sales receipt when they buy another pair of pants; the more personal information comes from just regular customer interaction. The result is a profile, and, when those customers come in or call, the Sales Associate has a resource to prep them for providing that “over the top” service.

So think about it. Would it help your business if you knew the brand preferences of all your clients? How about knowing in advance your chances of selling everything your vendor just offered at end-of-the-quarter special pricing?

Jack Mitchell knows the answer to both. It comes from his CRM system. He knows what his customers buy, so he knows just what he should be buying from his suppliers. You might say he’s taken that customer service thing to an extreme, but he got there because he and his team members THINK CRM.

You might not use these exact terms, but you might already be practicing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in your business. In its broadest sense, CRM is a concept used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, driven by a process to capture, store and analyze customer information, or so says Wikipedia. Or CRM is an information industry term for methodologies, software and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. That’s according to Whatis.com.

For you and your clients and their businesses, CRM means taking advantage of technologies to better serve clients and prospects by knowing more about them. That means everyone in the organization who might touch them has access to that knowledge so they can better serve them. You might think, as most people do, that CRM is the tool for the sales team to track prospects. But when you THINK CRM, you see it delivers value in Customer Service, Marketing, Help Desk, Workflow and just by integrating information from multiple systems.

Numerous publishers of CRM products would hope you’d think of them when you think CRM: ACT!, GoldMine, Microsoft CRM, SageCRM, Salesforce.com, SalesLogix, Siebel, Pivotal, and more. I have a different take. Those are the tools for using CRM, but I believe CRM is not a tool, but an attitude. “All good customer service is a result of nifty systems,” says Charlie the Fairy Godmother in Ken Blanchard’s “Raving Fans,” suggesting that true CRM is a result of attitude and tools working in unison.

On the Alabama coast, a reseller of boats recently used its new ACT! CRM to e-mail customers about a special on boat engines. Over the next two days, they sold eight of them. It worked so well they wished they had done it sooner. The fact is it worked so well only because they knew the interests of the customers, and by now drawing from the database they had a way to see that and act on it.