I am sure, everybody will agree that, managing customers is one of the important tasks for small and medium organisations. 

If you ask any of the owners or management of an SMEs, this will be a typical answer. 

“ SMEs  usually work on shoe string budget, and doesn’t have the privilege to accommodate any buffer exclusively for Customer management”.

But is it true ?  Not necessarily.   Even though some finance is involved in automating the customers touch points , you doesn’t need much of an escalation in your budget.   Rather “Customer management” should be a strategic initiative irrespective of the size of the organisation.   

Its evident from our day to day interactions that, small players manage their customers more intelligently than a big organisation.  for Eg.,  Even though you use Proctor and Gamble prdoucts, your neighbour hood shop keeper who sells the product of P& G will understand you better than the Proctor and Gamble.

Managing customers is not a one time activity, its an on going process though out the customer lifetime.  In order to serve a customer better,

we need to understand their behaviour better, 

we have to understand their spending power better,

we have to understand their preferences better,

We have to understand the satisfaction level each customer on your products / services better,

Also we need to understand our competitor’s “customer Management” strategy.

All these in a continues manner.   

How to monitor or analyse their behaviour pattern, or spending power or their satisfaction ?  This is the biggest question.   

One of the best option is grab and store each details from all customer touch points.   The resources who are facing the customers should clearly understand the organisation strategy, of how we are planning to treat each of the customers.  By empowering your customer touch point resources, you make sure that, you are getting what you desire.

In order to grab, store and analyse these data, you might need an automation tool, (like Winds CRM, a hosted CRM tool, which can be accessed as a Cloud model ). 

You need the whole process on customer management to be sponsored by the top officials of your organisation like, owner, proprietor, Managing Director, Chairman etc, that the whole mechanism can be practiced through the organisation.

Have an effective mechanism to understand the existing customers satisfaction level, and try to understand the level of advocacy a customer can render to your organisation.

In short, to improve and maintain a high degree of customer satisfaction level, the organisations should build and nurture a culture, which focuses on the customers. Organisations also has to build trust among the customers and maintain them through out the customer lifetime.

The Customer Relationship Management, is always thought to be something not reachable to small and medium organisations.  SMEs, or better called as Growing organisations, refuses to use CRM strategies mainly because of the less clarity towards this subject. 

CRM is basically a strategy which can be used regardless of the organisation’s size / Employee’s numbers  / Sales figures etc.,  To manage a growing business effectively, one organisation requires a clear vision in to their entire business process.  Unless and until , the owners  / stake holders of Growing companies have a clear vision on their activities, its hard for them to achieve their goal.  

Small organisations are the best bet for a clear CRM strategy, because of its small size, ease in quantifying the figures ,  flexibility in managing the process etc., etc.,   Unfortunately, when the small organisations grow slowly to a medium or large organisations, it becomes impossible to implement effective strategy which can sustain the complexity of business.

What small organisations should do to implement a successful CRM in their organistion :

1.       Define a small step goal towards CRM.

a.       Go step by step, which will help you to develop a fool proof system as well as decrease your expenditure on the new process.

b.      Set your vision  , say for eg: to increase the Customer satisfaction ratio.  Increase sales turnover, increase lead conversion ratio, etc.,

c.       Determine ways in which  you can achieve those goals.

d.      Use a good automation tool, which can help you to manage your business process easily and effectively.

e.      Review your strategy every 3 month ( minimum), and understand if you are going in right direction

f.        Increase the efficiency or improve the process according to your regular review report.

2.       Start Automating the process of Customer touch points

a.       Front line Sales staff are always the link between the organisation and the customers. If you could start your monitoring and managing from the sales force you will get good quality insight.

3.       Try to start with a  simple self help website which will help your customers to get connected to your customer support department.  This will also help the organisation to eliminate unproductive time spend on general queries of customers.