Leopard CRM is a web based CRM system designed to help you manage your sales, marketing and customer information.
Not totally CRM related, but my company has just released an online store for electronic gadgets including digital cameras, PDAs and MP3 players. For the technically literate people out there, it was developed in Ruby on Rails a fantastic web application framework which could host a fantastic CRM system one day.
Take a look: Go Go Gadget - digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players
Getting the right data into CRM systems. I’m sure that businesses spend a lot of money trying to improve their quality of data, and I’m sure some spend almost nothing (yikes!). What about particular businesses in the people industry? By people, I mean that these businesses are focused 100% on helping people, with almost no thought to monetary gain. It seems that one of the big problems with these industries is their aversion to computers (let alone CRM solutions!) and they’re reluctance to take the time to use such a system.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with someone in regards to writing down information about people they interact with in their job. I’ll call this person George (not his real name). George works in an industry where using computers are almost unheard of. The majority of the workforce are older and wiser than most, because these professionals use their experience and years of training to talk to people, helping them with their problems in life.
George mentioned to me that he would be interested in only talking to and helping people without all the administration tasks that go with it. I began to think to myself, there must be a mine of information that George would collect about someone after talking with them, how do you get a people person to spend the time entering information into a CRM system?
An interesting question, can anyone comment on helping George to use CRM in his industry?
There are many ways to say it, but to have your customers say type, or write something twice is just bad service. Effective CRM solutions can help you avoid this and help your customers to want to come back for more.
You’ve probably heard of the example said that remembering someone’s name is one of the most powerful ways to build rapport between people. You’ve probably also seen this in action and know that it’s true. Well, imagine if a business could remember all sorts of information about their customers. Imagine if a customer decides to buy something from your business again and you remember whatever they’ve told you previously. Your business looks professional and organised. The customer will feel warm and fuzzy and at best, will be a customer for life (as long as nothing happens to stop that), at worst, you’ve eliminated one possible reason that they wouldn’t return for further business.
It costs less to keep existing customers as compared to gaining new customers. So, make sure that you look closely at a customer’s interaction with your business, and make sure that you streamline your processes to eliminate hurdles for your customers. This may require creativity and a point of view of your business that you may find difficult to take. One of the best ways to do this is to get someone to analyse your business from this point of view. You’ll need someone who has good analytical skills as well as someone who knows how to critique appropriately (contact me if you’d like to hire me for this type of work).
One of the best ways to help people to learn is to use an example. Flybuys.com.au is “deserving” of the freebie this time. This may be difficult for you to try this out for yourself if you’re not a member of Flybuys, but I’ll do my best to explain the problem with words. The first thing that I wanted to do was to check how many points I had earned, and the second was to change my address. Checking my points was fairly easy, I just load up the site and enter my membership number into the text box on the top left hand side of the page.
OK, now take note. I have now entered my first piece of information, my Flybuys membership number. I should not have to provide this again, but as you’ll see, I do need to repeat myself.
Now that I’ve entered my membership number, not only am I presented with my points balance, which is nice, as this was my first request and I’m presented it on screen without asking. I am also presented with a membership menu on the left hand side of the screen, this gives me a number of options including changing my details and ordering a new card. I want to change my address, so I select “your details” from the menu. Here is the first problem. Now, understandibly, I am required to enter a few more details to change my details, such as my date of birth for identification. I have no problem with that, but it also asks me to enter my membership number again! I’ve already entered this, why must I enter it again?
I give in and type in my membership number again (what choice do I have?) and I also need to enter my phone number. Luckily enough, I do remember my old phone number, I enter it and am presented with my details which I change and submit. So, so far I’ve entered my membership number twice and my old phone number. Now that I’m in the site, I decide that I’d like to redeem my points for an award, but I decide firstly, to double check my points value. I click on the membership menu “check your points” and again I’m prompted for my membership number! For the third time, I enter it and I check my points again.
Now I would like to check what awards I can trade my points for. Another mistake of this design is that there is no membership menu option for redeeming your points. I needed to click on “Awards” on the main site menu. I do that and search for an award, I find one and click on it, and I am once again requested for my membership number, date of birth and phone number. The fourth time! My new phone number does not even work, I have to enter my old one. By now, I don’t trust these guys at all, and I think to myself, it’d be best to wait a few days to redeem my points as they’re likely to send my award to my old address even though I just changed it!
This is a simple example of designing your customer facing people and systems to keep customer information so that the customer does not have to repeat himself/herself. It is extremely frustrating and I’m sure that it drives customers away in droves. Make sure your company is a pleasure to deal with, spend the money that is necessary to build quality systems and you will be rewarded with customers that come back again and again.
CRM for Small Business has now moved to its new domain name: crmartist.com.
The original URL will still work, but all links will now point the new site. If you notice that anything is not working, please email me at - crm at danharper.org
If you’ve bookmarked or linked to the site, please update your links.
Ricoh, an office equipment supplier, has implemented a new Crossware CRM solution in their New Zealand office. They’ve outgrown their previous CRM solution, which was web based, since expanding to 45 sales representatives and additional support staff. (There’s no mention of what they used to use, but I couldn’t imagine that a system would struggle with 45 users. Maybe it was based on Microsoft Access!)
Some interesting points from this case study is the mention of mobile users on laptops. Since they used to have a web based CRM solution, this would make on the road use of the system fairly difficult if not designed properly. The new CRM solution gives them the ability to use a fully featured system off-line as well as “invisible” replication and syncronisation features.
Security measures are also a concern with this type of implementation as their entire set of customer data is fully mobile. If this data should fall into the wrong hands, it would have serious repercussions to the company. There is not much of a mention of exactly what steps were taken to prevent this data being viewed by unauthorised persons, but they’ve covered some of the holes. Unfortunately, the data is not necessarily safe because the application prevents access. Anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can just access the database directly. Let’s hope that this issue was considered in the solution.