It's not enough to just have customers, you need to improve how you manage them

Tags: crm, customer relationship management, online collaboration

Customer relationship management (CRM) is such a big subject area, but it is such a simple concept - i.e. if you manage your customers correctly, then they are likely to hang around or return next time. Fail to do so, well, we all know that bad experiences are spoken about more than others - so you don't just lose your customer, you lose potential future customers.

However, CRM systems are often seen as being at the hub of any CRM based organisation. Often formed out of a database and a call back system, these can go a long way to improving how you actually track and manage your customers.

However, it goes further than this database. CRM is about how you interact, where you interact, how easy it is to interact and what you interact with.

Say you are always on the phone, always talking and always emailing (well, as much as you need to anyway). However, you're still heavily reliant on email to transfer files, to record conversations and to disseminate tasks to your teams.

For my money, this is still all part of customer relationship management, but in truth when - as a client - I've had to work with my suppliers in this way a number of things have happened:

• Tasks and deadlines have been forgotten
• Everything has had to go through one person - creating Chinese whispers
• Often the emails get stopped because the file sizes are too big (think big presentations, videos and large images)
• I have no idea what stage people are at and I can't input until the work is at the next draft stage and sent to me
• Meetings are kept and stored on local servers - you don't know who's about or when

It's just plain annoying as a customer. Although, it isn't annoying enough to want to make me change supplier, it just causes frustrations and if any part of the work has problems then it all exacerbates each other and suddenly there is a bit of a problem.

Make customers part of your business

All of this impacts on the relationship, and can have an impact on how your customers perceive you. So why not make things more transparent.

Most of use use some form of extranet to share large files, but why not have something more usable.

We all use email to communication, but why not have discussions and comments in the same place where nobody is every kept out of the loop?

Why not have the same place contain the tasks and meetings so you can see deadlines?

What about brainstorming or conference calls?

One place is surely better than lots of emails, FTP sites, logins and calendars? At least you know where to go if you want to see what's been done.

As a supplier, it's understandable that this could cause headaches. The last thing you want is a client breaking your door down asking what you've been doing all the time you've been charging. But as the customer, the clarity and visibility which this kind of approach to CRM offers is just so much better and makes managing the supplier a much simpler process.

After all, without the customer your business is nothing, so why not make sure they are happy and able to collaborate on their own projects?