Keeping business records is so vital to your business. Customer records are some of the records any serious business should have. You’re in business to make money. And to make money, you have to be with customers. It’s your customers that keep you in business. It’s therefore vital to keep track of them.
What Are Customer Records?
Let’s first understand what customer records are before going into the details. These are simply records that contain essential information about your business relationship with your customers. These records contain and are not limited to your customers’ full name, company name, address, telephone, email, fax and website. They may also include birthdays, spending patterns, work history and any other business information you deem necessary.
How Do You Store Your Customer Records?
There are two challenging tasks in keeping customer records. The first one is setting up a customer database that suits your needs. The second is maintaining the discipline of capturing and updating your customers’ details.
To store your customer records, you can set up your customer database. This customer database could be complex for people not conversant with MS Excel. If you’re good at it, you can design your database that captures all the critical customer information that suits your needs.
Alternatively, you can store customer records using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. You can find online many CRMs which will enable you to store, access and manage your customer information. For instance, Zoho is one of the best paid online CRM that backs up your data.
Why It’s Important To Keep Customer Records
Keep Business Records
You should know that your customers are your business. Without them, you are not in business at all. Your customers provide you with a foundation for your business growth. The future lies in your prospective customers. The only proven way of building trusting relationships with these people is to communicate with them.
However, you cannot communicate with them effectively without a system that can capture their information. You can design one or source for the paid services of CRM.
Writing names on paper or holding them in your head is not an effective way to manage a customer database. It’s time-consuming if you do it this way. By having detailed customer records, you find it easier to understand your business better. You can analyse their spending patterns and see the trends. This information will be helpful to you with your future business decisions and marketing activities.
Tips On How To Get The Details of Your Customers
Depending on how you get customer orders, you will need to make sure that you develop a systematic and easy way of getting the information you need.
When you get new customers, they expect you to ask for their details. They also feel connected to you because they have decided to buy from you. Because of that, you need to show them the value of being kept informed and in touch with you. You do it by doing the following:
- First, ask for customer details at the time of the sale.
- Secondly, create a system that works well with your customers so that you don’t much of their time.
- Thirdly, get into the habit of doing it.
- Fourthly, ensure you give them a good reason for taking their details.
- Fifthly, call your customers at least once a year and update their details.
- Lastly, ensure you have someone responsible for keeping customers records up to date. It’s easier to do it day after day than leaving it to build up because you risk losing information.
Conclusion
Keeping customer records is key to your business growth. But to effectively store them, you need to establish an effective system. The system you set up should be user-friendly. It should also contain the information you need about your customers. Most importantly, you have to update your records so often, preferably daily.
Do you keep customer records? How do you keep them? What are you doing to improve your customer relationship if you don’t maintain them?
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