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Putting the customer right at the centre of the organization is the be-all and end-all of successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM). To do that you have to know what your customers really want and really think about your business and then use that to deliver better products and services, improve customer service and increase sales opportunities – yes CRM has a purpose it is not just a concept!

Companies that invest in CRM systems can learn even more about their customers and offer more personalized products and services because they receive relevant information daily in a way that allows them to spot trends.

Implementing new business strategies always includes an element of risk but proper change management practices can reduce this dramatically. The reason many projects fail lies with poor project execution. Many companies have made the mistake of rushing headlong into CRM without a well thought out plan. So when investing in better CRM:

1. Have a CRM strategy because CRM initiatives launched without a strategy invariably cause pain. Do not think of CRM as a project separate from your overall business plan. That way madness lies. CRM only works when there is clear understanding of why the organisation is doing it and how it will improve service and loyalty, cut costs or increase revenue.

2. Choose the right CRM partner. The best CRM solutions are flexible and have a full integration capability with any other systems in your business.

3. Understand the technology. Far too often CRM is considered an IT project – not a business initiative and it should not be thought of like this; but this means that the business has to understand the technology and what and how it can do for them and what it cannot do for them. The greatest success will come from the coordinated efforts business users, IT and supplier.

4. Focus more on business processes than technology. CRM is about an organization’s internal and external business processes becoming more “customer-centric”. Understand your "customer flow". The systems are merely the enablers, not an end in themselves.

5. Don’t try and design the perfect CRM system that will meet 100% of each and every person’s wish list and do not expect the new CRM solution to just mirror current business processes. Instead, accept that not everyone can have everything they say they want and use the new systems as an opportunity to invent and use new processes that improve customer service, reduce costs and provide better customer service.

6. Do not try to change the whole organization overnight. Go for the highest priority and highest return areas first. Take small, manageable steps not giant leaps and bring the whole organization along with you.

7. Think about the user interface and plan it carefully. For people to use the system, it must be useful to them and easy to use. Every extra field you ask the people to complete, especially mandatory ones, the greater the chance that they will enter garbage or only use the system under duress.

8. Especially if you haven’t implemented a CRM system before get help and expect to pay for it even if it is just a day of a supplier’s time to go through the issues. They’ll see the pitfalls that you can’t and you will not waste time and money on trying to do things that can’t be done, expecting them to happen in a certain way and then be disappointed or miss out on crucial issues that are essential to successful implementation.

9. Make it somebody’s responsibility to own the data, and to make sure that it is correct and complete. Sounds obvious but so many projects just ignore this central detail and CRM systems stand or fall by their data integrity and data quality.

10. User acceptance is the single most important success factor for a CRM system so invest in training. Training is essential to ensuring user acceptance. Never let an untrained employee have customer contact.

TOP TIPS FOR SEO

SEO = search engine optimization. Good search results are essential to your site. Many people do not go beyond the first page of the results pages so you need to ensure that your site is search engine optimised or you wont get any traffic never mind the right sort of traffic – traffic that brings you business that is.

So what are the things you need to do to have a chance to rank well? As every search engine has a different “algorithm” (which just means a mathematical rule or procedure for solving a problem) and each “algorithm” has literally hundreds of inputs this may seem like an impossible question to answer. And to answer it with 100% accuracy is impossible but there are certain things that have a major effect that you must do just to stand a chance.

1. Make sure that your site is technically sound and well built with plain English page titles rather than: sessionid=4D6BE5993FFF956660C27184A2F39E81.TC30a?__frame=_top and with all “non HTML” code (HTML = Hypertext Markup Language and is the basic language used to write web pages) called in from separate directories.

2. Choose keywords and phrases very carefully. Keywords should be the words that customers actually use to find your site when using a search engine. Amazingly most people just ignore this basic fact and never get any research done on the subject!!! That’s like turning up to the airport with no money, no ticket and no passport and expecting to get on a plane – in other words: nuts!

3. Once you know what keywords to use write a page with a relevant page title for each keyword or phrase using simple language with variations of the keyword or phrase to reach a keyword density of about 5 – 8% and about 500 words per page minimum with paragraphs that use <H> tags in their sub headings. Make sure that your keyword(s) or phrase(s) appear in each of your pages' "meta tags”. Make sure that ll you photos have descriptions.

4. Find a way to build up the relevant links to your site from other sites. Search engines view inbound links as a vote for your site. Therefore, in general, the more incoming links to relevant parts of your site from relevant “anchor text” (the visible text in a hyperlink you click to go to another page or website) on other sites the higher your page will rank, but the linking sites must be relevant and links from disreputable sites can harm your ranking.

5. Continually add new content. Sites that continually add new content and new pages get better rankings because search engines like new relevant content. Search engines’ “spiders” or “web crawlers” are a program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that then indexes those pages to provide fast searches. Spiders are always on the lookout for fresh content.

6. Put up a site map which shows every page on the site and has a link to it. This will help the search engine robots find every page. If you are updating regularly then an XML site map for Google that “pings” Google about every update should be added too.

7. Make sure you have basic management information about the site – how many visitors, where they go, where they leave etc. Arguably this is just as important as the site itself as it allows you to improve it based on actual results.

8. Finally – build a site for people that is interesting to people. No point in being at the top of the search engines if people just refuse to stay or buy!!! People generally stay on sites that are relevant to what they are looking for at the time, are easy to navigate, easy to read and easy to buy from. Whilst they like “prettily designed” sites form tend to be less important than relevance and ease of use.They also like interacting via chat rooms or watching relevant “movies”.

ECOMMERCE FOR SMALL AND ALL BUSINESSES

According to Lee Traupel – an internet guru – “there is a huge knowledge gap about how the web is really driving online and offline commerce”. His recent articles point out that according to “a recent ECommercePulse survey of more than 33,000 surfers conducted by Nielsen/Net ratings and Harris Interactive indicates ECommerce sites are driving more purchases offline (phone, catalogue, retail store sales) than online.”

In the article he also states that “according to a recent Zona Research and Keynote Systems Report released earlier this summer (2005), over $25 Billion (USD) was lost in ECommerce due to users abandoning the web site prior to a purchase being made or during the process. The users just gave up because the load times (the amount of time it takes a page to be displayed in a browser) were painfully slow. It's critical to make the market aware of a site, but if the potential customers are not presented with the right navigation and menus (read information architecture), they will not buy. Many firms fail to properly integrate their ECommerce components with the overall site design. The in-house developers or the outside design firm concentrate on the sexy parts of the web site design process (the graphics, branding, look and feel) and only focus on the ECommerce process after the primary web site design is completed, making ECommerce an afterthought.”

And yet despite all the issues ECommerce continues to grow as in general it’s easy to use and time friendly – you don’t have to wear out shoe leather traipsing around a whole load of retail stores that are frequently even more dismal than a poor ECommerce site.

And apart from the issues mentioned above [WITH WHICH WE ENTIRELY AGREE - FAR TOO MANY ECommerce SITES ARE DESIGNED FIRST AND PLANNED LATER!] ECommerce is relatively quite easy compared to retail. If you get the site technical issues sorted then all you need are:

1. Good products

2. Customer-friendly policies

3. On-time delivery

Of course the site has to be found and that means good marketing both offline and online, but if you have offline customers then telling them about the online option will start the process and integrating it fully into your whole strategy will really reap dividends. Many smaller retailers – especially those in niche markets – have found that they can extend their geographic coverage with very low cost.