Have you checked your CRM lately? For the uninitiated: CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.  It’s basically what we used to call “personal service” back in the old days, in other words doing your best to get to know your customers and keeping in touch with them so that they’d come back often.

Today’s CRM is often a software program, or a series of them, used for email marketing, customer information storage (purchasing history, birthdate, etc.), loyalty program management, and per-customer customizable interest rates.  What is a per-customer customizable interest rate?  I’m not sure.  I suppose it must refer to offering different interest rates on charged purchases based on the rest of the customer’s CRM data.

Many stores use a POS (point of sale) system, often integrating it with the back office’s bookkeeping system for a seamless coordination of the shop’s finances.  The addition of a CRM system takes this one step further, compiling information from each sale and adding it to the customer’s stored profile. 

What once might have seemed an invasion of privacy is now such a commonplace occurrence that we accept the fact that the grocery store knows our food preferences, that Amazon recommends products that we might like, and that Facebook magically makes ads for items we’ve been researching pop up along side our news feed.

Proponents of this technology such as Sales Force claim that CRM helps “develop real-time connections with customers, deepening loyalty and creating new business opportunities.”  And while I agree that new ways of reaching out to customers, especially via permission-based email and social media, can strengthen relationships already started by providing good service in the store, I don’t think that reliance on a program will ever take the place of developing face-time connections.

There are, however, strong reasons to have data available to back up these efforts.  We identify our top customers each year through our loyalty program and offer them a special thank you and gift in December.  We use the birthday dates shared by our customers to reach out and send them an invitation to come in during their month for a surprise (and we make sure it’s a fairly substantial item).  And we use our list of those interested in cooking to send out a targeted mailing about Cooking School classes. 

These are all components of our relationships with customers that our informal version of a CRM helps us manage. If you’d like more information about the formal systems, you can get some helpful suggestions for selecting a CRM program here.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder