Supply Chain and Operations Management Weekly Tips

- Every dollar your business earns comes from a customer. In order to ensure that you have a steady stream of revenue in the future, you need to know who are your customers, what have they bought in the past, and what are they going to buy next. Let's see how to use a customer relationship management system or CRM to gather information that will help you answer those questions. Traditional brick and mortar businesses like the local grocery store or coffee shop sell directly to consumers who walk in, buy stuff, and walk out.

Their customers are often reluctant to share personal information, so many brick and mortar companies have introduced loyalty programs where customers earn points or discounts in exchange for sharing information about who they are and what they buy. The customers benefit because they save money and the company benefits because they now have better data about their customers. That's stored in the CRM. Online retailers have a different challenge.

They tend to have a lot of information about their customers because they require people to set up accounts before they can begin shopping. They also use tools like cookies to track which products customers search for and buy. In fact, online retailers can end up with so much data about their customers that the big challenge is figuring out what to do with it. They use their CRM for analytics to sift through all of that big data and find the insights that will help them better serve their customers.

For businesses that sell to other businesses, the challenge of collecting customer information is a bit different. B2B companies do a good job of tracking customer interactions using purchase orders, invoices, and other legal documents. But they may not do as good of a job understanding what triggers purchasing decisions and what commitments are made along the way. In B2B sales you may have several people from your company talking with several people from your customer's company, so the CRM can provide a central repository that lets you organize all of these conversations and ensures that your customer service and sales processes are fully synchronized.

No matter what business you're in, understanding the relationship that your company has with each of your customers can give you a competitive advantage. By collecting and analyzing the right information in a CRM system, you can use technology to enhance your customer relationships, provide more value to your customers, and manage your supply chain more effectively.