We have all heard this term "Customer Relationship Management" being thrown around as the latest must-have, but what does it really mean in simple terms? Is it just a clever software package you can buy off-the-shelf? Or perhaps something only the large corporates need to worry about?

If you have customer's then it would seem sensible to learn more about their needs and behaviour so you can develop a stronger, lasting relationship with them. That's CRM in a nutshell, bringing together information to provide:

	Excellent customer service
	Effective customer contact
	Information to enable cross selling
	Simplified marketing and sales processes
	Development of new customers
	Maximised customer revenue

Really effective Customer Relationship Management stems from deciding what type of customer information you are interested in and what you intend to do with it. Here are some examples of typical CRM data:

	Contact details, name, address, web data, sales or registration
	Source - marketing and advertising campaigns
	Sales
	Products, service and support data
	Accounts information
	Shipping and fulfilment statistics

Once you have decided on the type of information, you will need to look at how it is stored, and then how it is used. Data must be relevant, collect it only to use it, there is no point in collecting it to store it. It is common for information to enter a company via several channels, CRM systems will help you link all this data together to pin-point trends, and provide a holistic view of your customer. At this point technology plays an important role in sorting the data into meaningful statistics so that it can be used to identify what your customers want. You can then respond appropriately.

How can Seymour Hunter help?

All our service solutions contain an element of CRM. Our call centre has the ability to feed the agreed information into your existing CRM systems and exchange data in an industry format (such as CSV) on a regular basis.

We have the ability to provide detailed consultancy and advice structured specifically to your business.