Customer Contact Strategy – Why it’s a must

Tony Beales explains the basics

Why is a Customer Contact Strategy (CCS) so important?
It’s about retaining customers and avoiding customer churn in order to operate more profitably. Customers are hard to win, but easy to lose. Research has shown that customers leave not because of price, but because they feel they haven’t been treated properly and that it’s 5 times cheaper to trade with existing customers than to win new ones.

How does a CCS help?
It helps you to know your customers (who they are, what they buy, how they like to be treated and so on), handle them efficiently and use knowledge intelligently.

How can IT help with this?
Through good CRM (Customer Relationship Management), business analytics and loyalty programmes. CRM, for example, should store customer contact information centrally, make customer information available to all customer-facing staff, provide work flows for handling specific types of contact and integrate to loyalty systems to identify and reward good customers.

Why do so many CRM systems fail?
Usually they’re too complex and need too many business processes to be changed to fit around CRM. Success depends on simplicity and tight integration to business processes. BCP’s Accord CRM, for example, is simple, fully integrated to Telesales, Account Management and other business operations and has the same look and feel as the rest of Accord.

Do all wholesale systems offer CCS?
No. You’d need to check with your supplier or, if you’re looking for a new solution, ensure it’s on your ‘wish list’.

To learn more about BCP’s Customer Contact Strategy please submit a contact form or call us on 0161 355 3000, asking to speak to one of the Distribution sales team.