Still keeping track of your customers the old-fashioned way? You’re not alone. A surprising number of small businesses still rely on old-school methods of recording their customers’ purchasing and contact information. The problem is that most of those methods—be it a notebook or spreadsheet—aren’t the safest (or most legal) method of customer management and they put your business at unnecessary risk.
Every business, from plumbers to salons, run on sensitive information like birthdays, social security numbers, credit card numbers, addresses, and personal contact information. If you process credit cards or keep any customer information on file, it may be time to consider digitizing.
Traditional methods of storing customer information make it difficult to recall past customer’s purchase, it requires a lot of your time to keep them updated, and too often important parts fall through the cracks. In many cases, the information you need to run your store is sensitive enough that even federal law prohibits your most trusted employees from having access to it.
Protecting this information isn’t just a good idea, it’s never been easier. Today we want to highlight four of the biggest benefits of using digitized customer management software.
1. Protect and secure private information
Keeping your customer and business information secure is a smart business practice. It also happens to be a federal requirement. With trusted, verified secure customer relationship management software, you and your customers can rest easy and know their information is safe and secure.
Every new customer should have their own, unique profile that you can quickly look up in your centralized customer directory. You need to be able to see their past purchases, buying behaviors, and personal details faster than ever, and all that information needs to be secure.
2. Simplify your record keeping
Let’s say you run a bike shop. How do you remember if a customer bought a helmet or something else? If you know it was a helmet, do you recall if they bought an extra-large, matte-black helmet of a specific brand with a carbon fiber visor?
Having this level of specificity will help you get better business results with less time and effort. But manually tracking such detailed information on a customer-to-customer basis would be a daunting task. With a digitized customer management tool in place, you’ll record every detail without having thinking twice about it.
You can put your record keeping on autopilot. You won’t have to train employees to ask for information at the register, nor will you have to worry about details falling through the cracks. When you centralize your customer directory, you’ll be able to automatically capture many of the most valuable pieces of information when they pay.
3. Get to know your customers
A manual ledger of your customers limits your ability to get to know your customers. With a digital customer management platform, you can have a customer directory that is searchable, filterable, and easy to understand. You’ll be able to identify your best customers (the ones who spend the most in your store) and how they are different from your most frequent customers (the ones who shop with you the most). You’ll even be able to see which of your customers may need a little extra love to nudge them back in.
4. Stay engaged
Customers want and expect a digital relationship with the businesses they patronize. They want email notifications for deals, specials, and events. They want to stay informed and updated.
That’s hard to do without a method to keep in touch when they walk out the door. It’s even harder to do if you don’t have a record for first-time buyers. A customer management tool that creates a profile for each customer, not just the ones you know on a first-name basis, will help you keep in touch with customers and keep them coming back.
Customer engagement is more than just knowing who your customers are or what they bought. Customer engagement is about growing a stronger relationship with them and encouraging them to continue doing business with you. Knowing who they are is the first step. The next is engaging them with relevant and well-timed messages, which isn’t possible without a solid customer directory.
Take action
Womply makes customer management a breeze. Our customer management solutions automatically build or update customer records every time someone transacts with your business, creating a customer directory that gets better every day without any work on your part. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!