Customer Records: Then And Now

[Howard Larson]

As we have access to more and more information it is important to keep better, deeper more accurate more complete records of customers and companies. What have we been doing and what might we want to be collecting?

Traditional Customer Record Keeping
1) Account date
2) Order entry data including in-store, phone orders, e-commerce
3) Billing information
4) Credit information, including third-party info like Dun & Bradstreet ratings bank info and credit agency inquiries
5) Customer cost allocation data
6) Interaction data that involved communication with the customer including emails, phone calls, online chats, etc
7) Service data including open tickets, successful and unsuccessful service requests, standard inquiries etc.
8) Marketing data, including campaign responses, promotion offered and reaction to them.
9) Segmentation data including standard demographic data, and company and/or household information

New areas of Customer Record Keeping

10) Records of unstructured individual customer conversations found via social media monitoring and text analysis which might include comments, discussions in threaded forums, blog posts etc.

11) Profile information from SM areas like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Nings, MerchantCircle and other social networking sights.

12) Records of content created by the individual influencer or customer

13) Third party information associated with an account including competitive intelligence or contemporary news

14) The nature of the customer’s role as a decision maker within a business in a B2B transaction, the influence they wields and how and how they influence

Larson Notes & Satire: The information over load hits Contact Management. It had to happen. All that information floating around out there, some good, some a sheer waste of time, had and should be put to use for the betterment of your customer profiles and creating a prospect profile to go out and find more customers. Sigh, all it takes is time.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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P.P.S. An American Company, marketing American Companies! Call or email to get an appointment to pick my brain (a $125.00 value) for 30 minutes.

[Lindy Asimus]

Profiling and database marketing is my pet love Howard. Amazing how few people systematically collect critical data the business needs, few others (outside Amazon and the like) who actually put the information to good use.

It never fails to delight me the shock when I do a profiling session with an accountant etc when they discover what they have been sitting on - and ignoring!

In many cases, it is not possible to profile businesses because they have no data available in their records to objectively measure. It then becomes a case of setting up a system for them to use to capture those pieces of information and keep up to date.