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Author: Steve Riley Date: 19 Mar 2010 It’s about customers, not productsOnce upon a time Marks & Spencer was famous for its customer service. Everyone knew that you could take something back if there was a problem with it. Or even if you’d just changed your mind. It was a unique selling point for them. Sure, some customers pushed it a bit far, but for the majority of decent well-behaved customers it was a comfort to know there’d be no embarrassing stand off if there was a problem with something you’d bought. As a result M&S commanded fantastic customer loyalty. Bending a little to accommodate the customer, brought the rewards back to them in spades. Pretty soon other retailers were eyeing-up this goodwill and wanting the same for their own businesses. The big names on the High Street caught up and M&S no longer had a USP, meaning the bar had been raised for everyone. You could argue that these high levels of customer expectations makes things hard for the retailer or wholesaler, but you’d largely be wasting your breath. The goalposts have moved, the consumer wins.
You still need good product knowledge, but now that’s your baseline. To stand out from the crowd, you need great customer service. Really great customer service. And one of the ways you can achieve this is by knowing your customers well: what kind of work they specialise in, their buying patterns, their favourite products, the problems they are trying to solve. The businesses of Amazon, Apple, Dell and Tesco – some of the most powerful brands in the world – are built on vast customer databases. They know more about your spending and preferences than you’d care to admit. Some of the ‘You might be interested in these...’ suggestions on my own Amazon home page can be uncannily accurate. These big organisations are now almost database companies, who happen to sell products as well. That’s how seriously they take data. So what can you do? To learn more about your customers, you probably need some form of CRM system. Most of you deal with too many people, from too many organisations, to reliably hold all the information you need in your head. Plus everyone in your organisation needs to be able to draw upon the knowledge you hold. But a full-blown enterprise CRM solution can be costly and difficult to implement, and might be overkill. If you’re already using bisTrack, you should find out more about bisTrack CRM. If you’re not already using bisTrack, the fact that it comes with its own CRM, is one more compelling reason to put it on your wish list.
[This article has also appeared as a Guest Blog on the Builders Merchants Journal website.] |
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And the service levels customers get from M&S, Boots, Tesco, etc., they have come to expect from the merchant and wholesale end of the market. No longer can you afford your trade counter to be a place for trades to hang out, but off-putting to the general public. We all now expect a decent standard of store layout, nicer fittings and slicker point-of-sale systems, more akin to the retail experience. Here too the bar has been raised..jpg)
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Mike MacLellan, MD, GPH Builders Merchant"The great thing is we can always export information to Excel and produce any report we need — such as an aged debt report by sales rep, or our bespoke ‘exposure’ report, which helps us assess potential credit risk and protect ourselves."
Damien Cosgrove, Credit Control Manager, Noyeks Newmans"The great thing is we can always export information to Excel and produce any report we need — such as an aged debt report by sales rep, or our bespoke ‘exposure’ report, which helps us assess potential credit risk and protect ourselves."
Damien Cosgrove, Credit Control Manager, Noyeks Newmans"The reporting capabilities of bisTrack really help the sales department answer day to day enquiries. It gives them instant access to information about purchasing volumes and when timber is due to come in."
Wayne Abrams, Project Leader, Arbor Forest Products"The time was right for a change of software at Alsford's and we selected bisTrack from a shortlist of three. The key criteria was 'business fit'. We wanted a Microsoft Windows, intuitive solution which would best serve our claim to be 'The Timber Experts' in all our 20 branches."
Neil Fuller, MD, Alsford Timber"Stock counting is one of the best facilities in bisTrack ever. Stock counting across multiple locations is effortless with multiple entries of the same product. Entering a count is even easier. Counting 10,000 lines used to take two of us 4 days. This time it was 8 hours."
East End Group"We looked at several systems, but most of them were using the same out-of-date technology as the system we were replacing!"
Rodney Scoles, Director, T Brewer & Co"It's a very nicely laid out system with easy to follow structural menus and taskpads which, even if I haven't used a particular function before, I find relatively simple to complete."
Chris Pratt, Pratts Timber and Builders Merchants Ltd"It's a very nicely laid out system with easy to follow structural menus and taskpads which, even if I haven't used a particular function before, I find relatively simple to complete."
Chris Pratt, Pratts Timber and Builders Merchants Ltd"It's a very nicely laid out system with easy to follow structural menus and taskpads which, even if I haven't used a particular function before, I find relatively simple to complete."
Chris Pratt, Pratts Timber and Builders Merchants Ltd“A member of our buying group told us about bisTrack, although we looked at four or five other software packages. Key factors in the eventual selection of bisTrack were its SQL platform and our confidence in the people we dealt with.”
Gordon Rothwell, James Hargreaves (Plumbers Merchants)“Hargeaves are ideally placed to take advantage of the offer – whilst we plan to continue using e-Xact to update our product file we also want much better control over special product sales and purchases."
Gordon Rothwell, James Hargreaves MD"We helped ourselves by getting bisTrack on board quickly and painlessly while business was slow, so we won't have disruption as we start to implement a very aggressive three year strategic plan."
Neil Fuller, Managing Director, Alsford Timber"Good customer service is easier to achieve with good IT systems to back up our staff. Progressive provides us with an efficient system for dealing with customers, and good management tools to enable us to concentrate our efforts in the right direction."
David Dunmow, Group Finance Director, James Latham plc"Performance across the system is continuously enhanced too. Since our last release, finding products is now significantly faster ...by up to 30%."
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Ian Murchie, Operations Director, Howie Forest Products"Stock counting is one of the best facilities in bisTrack ever. Stock counting across multiple locations is effortless with multiple entries of the same product. Entering a count is even easier. Counting 10,000 lines used to take two of us 4 days. This time it was 8 hours."
East End Group"We improved net margin by 3% within 6 weeks of going live on bisTrack."
Andy Halpin, Payne Timber"bisTrack was a big investment for us but it's the best change we've ever made. We've grown so much over the last four or five years, we simply couldn't have carried on using a manual system."
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