Sage Blog

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

It’s the busiest time of year for the world’s leading gift distributor (no…we don’t mean Amazon). With lists to check (twice), worldwide flights to arrange and a busy team of helpers working flat out right up until Christmas Eve there’s some pretty smart software keeping everything running like clockwork.

Santa's SalesLogix CRM

Our customer gets requests via letter and, these days, email and has to manage a vast database of information including names, addresses, ages, delivery schedules and the all important naughty or nice lists. So it’s important that he has a hard-working customer relationship management system, Sage SalesLogix, to help his festive workers fulfil all their orders in time.

Purchase lists, product information and gift history are all centrally recorded in one constantly updated system. And there’s a mobile link, so it’s available wherever and whenever it’s needed to make sure there are no hiccups with deliveries.

Now this particular customer is well known for carrying out his business without attracting too much attention to himself, but we did manage to get a few words from him: “Ho, ho…every year, more children and more gifts, it’s a big old responsibility, but things have never run so smoothly. Now I know exactly who has asked for what and when I can deliver it. So everything’s ready for December 24.”

So, what’s this all got to do with the customer-relationship software you use and your business’ customer strategy ? 

Let’s start with the software first.  You are likely to be using customer-relationship software  to help your lead prospecting activities.  Capturing names & interests is at the very heart of of customer-relationship software.  Yet, those same prospect records can be greatly enriched through the information available on through Social Media outlets.  Information such as:

• What topics are important to them?
• Who else are they talking to?
• What are they saying experiences (products & more) ?

You can use information from these sites to help enrich a prospect’s record as part of building your  customer relations program.  That’s converting time spent on social media sites into revenue for your business.  Information from these sites can be fed directly into CRM – be that ACT!, Sage CRM or SalesLogix, informing & improving your direct marketing activities.

Relating Social media to your customer strategy – listening for & managing the content.

Your investment in CRM is key to your customer retention strategy.  Ensuring you stay relevant in to customers, both before and after a sale.  But without social media interaction, you can only “know” about the conversations you have directly with them.  What happens when they talk about you in other forums – blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc ?

 Investing time in social media outlets provides you with an opportunity to ‘listen in’ to the conversations being discussed (check out our free guide Connecting with your customers; a guide to social media to help you get started). You can develop an understanding of your customers and benefit from insights within their communities.  Further, with businesses getting more than half of their customers through word of mouth, staying tuned in & monitoring the flow of conversation will give insights to other prospects & encourage the flow across these informal networks.

 Listening in also gives you a chance to improve customer relations when things go wrong for a customer.  By tuning in to relevant conversations, you can dramatically improve your chances of finding unhappy customers quickly and addressing their issues before they do serious damage to your brand.  

 An investment in CRM software is only partially realised without a matching customer strategy.  Harnessing Social Media is an essential part of your business’ customer strategy & key to keeping customers.