I was chatting with the manager of a small business the other day and it became apparent that the only thing that they were interested in was acquiring new clients.
It's occured from reading threads on this site that many of us suffer from the same short sighted approach but don't even see that we have a problem.
Coming from a background in banking where CRM is an important aspect of everything that the bank does I just wanted to emphasise to all the importance of all three aspects of Customer Relationship Management.
1) Customer Acquisition
non of our businesses would get very far without finding the clients in the first place. This is the area that most posts on this site tend to concentrate on.
Finding customers though is only half the battle. There is real skill involved in keeping them and just as importantly making a good profit from them.
2) Customer Retention
how do we keep our clients wanting to use our services?
What differentiates the service we offer?
How do we reward customer loyalty?
Kris has touched upon this area in the past with referral payments but to my mind equally important to acquisition incentives are the inclusion of value added services such as a periodic newsletter or a very minor service / reports included for free. (and ensuring that the client knows that they are getting something for free that they would have to pay for elsewhere).
The better that we perform at this stage the more likely that referrals from happy customers will feed back into stage (1) Customer Acquisition.
3) Customer Extension
how else can we get money from our clients?
What other related services can we offer?
Things like offering management accounts and investigation insurance to clients would fall into this category.
Don't however offer or push anything that could adversely affect stage (2) ciustomer retention!
In an unplanned manner all of us probably cover all three aspects of CRM but in a kneejerk manner when the situation demands it such as actions taken when a client is thinking about moving to another service provider rather than ensuring that clients do not want to move to another service provider in the first place.
Anyway, this is one of those Sunday afternoon topics that I thought might make one or two think about the formal and informal CRM systems that they have in place for their businesses.
Hope that this short note starts you thinking about how to apply CRM to your business and helps to increase your profits.
kind regards,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Shaun, I think this is a great post. I don't have any clients yet but having worked hard and waited and waited for the first ones, I don't want to lose them. I can see that it is important to think about points 2 and 3 throughout the life of our businesses.
Cheers Nick, cheers Sylvia, just one more service that I offer
Hi Bob,
Thanks for the link. I'll have a play with the free version and see if it's something that I might be able to use or harvest parts of.
kind regards,
Shaun.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Just one of those problems that there is so much to do and not enough hours in the day.... lightbulb.... Although maybe there would be if I didn't spend all of my time on here.
lol, lightbulb... Thats Groo off despicable me isn't it.... Maybe tikme for a change of Avatar.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
