CRM tools are only as good as the data that drives them. If you are unsure of who your customer is and why they are buying from you, it is difficult to capture decision data or apply key tools such as push - pull technology to drive support calls and up-sell or cross-sell actions.

The result? Your contact with the customer feels vulnerable and the tool you have invested in becomes the focus of blame rather than boast as it fails to deliver insight. CRM should build customer relations and it can only do this by understanding your customers right from the very start.

It’s simple really, any CRM strategy needs a have a 'data lifecycle strategy', which covers data that evolves to support the business need, to make it work faster, harder and become more dynamic. With a data lifecycle approach, you have profiled your customers; you will understand their procurement history and their motives and preferences. Similarities across your customer groups will be found, tendencies, habits and trends can then be used beyond traditional segmentation to highlight key trigger stages in a customer’s relationship with you. This is all fed into your CRM strategy, driven not only by the tool but also the data that you have amassed over your trading years.

A powerful combination: your data, QGate and Anderson Baillie.

Potential revenue and profit values are then realised through vastly improved customer relations, a single customer may now present the vision of an entirely new market place and perhaps the mass of customers you thought valuable may now be revealed as an overhead with little further potential for your business.

CRM without a data lifecycle strategy simply does not work, let QGate and Anderson Baillie help you develop your data to improve your customer relations and to profit by them. To get started please contact our CRM experts.