Using technology to improve your customer focus

All these things are possible. They're not even difficult or expensive to implement: technology has finally reached the point where it can almost always outstrip our thought horizons. Now all we need to do is catch up with it.

If anybody was in need of reasons to up their game with customers, the current economic environment is providing plenty. Tight conditions have a way of sharpening our customer focus - now that everyone is watching budgets, we can get away with less than when times were good and wallets opened more easily.

Improve customer orientation

So what are the things new technologies can help you do to improve your customer orientation?

The first and most significant step is data integration: putting all the information about your customers into one easily accessible place. In most companies today this information is fragmented across many different files and systems: accounting and billing databases, spreadsheets of varying quality kept by sales and after sales service teams, mailing lists, web sign-ups and so on. Pulling it all together means that when one person updates a telephone number or any other detail, the new information is instantly available to everyone.

It doesn't sound sexy, but it works. Best of all, integrating your customer data is now quick and easy to do without spending a fortune, no matter how old your underlying systems are or how small your business is. Just about anybody can use the new tools: The technology of customer management has come a long way since the days when it was all about huge systems, months-long implementation projects and mega-budgets.

For example, one of South Africa's biggest online retailers has integrated the information from its web back-end with its other customer information, so that call centre operators can get instant access to order histories when customers call. That means customers get helped more efficiently, which in turn makes them more likely repeat customers.

In the same way, a digital equipment distributor has integrated all its information about billing, returns and maintenance contracts with its customer relationship management (CRM) system so that everyone in the organisation has access to that mythical and longed-for beast called “a single view of the customer”. It's what everyone has really wanted all along, and what the technology now makes possible.

Once you have a single box to put all your customer information into, you can start to do some more interesting and exciting things with it.

Social media

For example, try using the burgeoning forms of social media including your website, blogs, Facebook, MXit and a host of other forums to interact with your customers in new ways. If your customers join a Facebook group or fill in an online survey or competition about your product, that information can now all become part of your data pool. The better you know your customers, the better you will be able to serve them - and the bigger your advantage will be in the market.

Again, none of this is expensive or difficult to implement any more. The technology is now easy to use, widely available and cheap to use - so long as you've first built your centralised customer database.

The ability to automatically trigger new customer interactions based on specific events is another benefit of integrating all your data. It's now simple to send an automated SMS or email message on birthdays, to check that customers are happy after a service or to schedule a call when a purchase is returned or negative feedback is offered in an online forum.

Even the oldest and most stubborn bugbear of CRM systems, getting staff to actually use them, has now been conquered. Information can be presented to staff members in whichever way is most convenient for them: via a web interface, inside Outlook, or in an exported spreadsheet that updates automatically from the central database every time it's opened.

There is no longer any good reason why every single person in your organisation who interacts with a customer shouldn't have access to the same, up-to-date information. A customer who's asked the same thing twice in the same call, or who confronts an accounts clerk ignorant of the discount they just negotiated with the sales team, is not going to be a happy customer. If you haven't already integrated your data, now is the best possible time to start.