What is CRM?

No this is not a disease or the latest type of mixed martial art. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. The term CRM is often universally used interchangeably to describe a form strategy for managing client relationships and the software & technology that enables this process. 

Most commonly CRM is principally aimed at managing the sales process. However properly incorporated it can be used to automate and organize many aspects of business process management (BPM). These areas include technical support, customer service and marketing.

The benefits of implementing a good CRM system include the following:

• Creating a streamlined and automated sales & marketing process
• Dramatically lowering overhead (this can be storage costs, office supplies and labor hours)
• Increasing the value of each client through easy up-selling and cross promotions
• Increased and streamlined communication (both within your organization and with your customers)
• A higher level of efficiency
• Simplified methods of analyzing performance and metrics
• Ease of launching into new markets
• Higher level of customer loyalty and repeat business
• Security
• Increased speed for changing business processes & marketing initiatives

Clearly those businesses that do not have a formal system for CRM are at a huge disadvantage to those that do. And it is obvious that that difference can mean the difference between make or break or mom & pop and being the next Bill Gates.

Over the last 10 years there has been a huge surge in the CRM business with dramatic advances in software and technology that have changed how the world does business. In fact a whopping $11billion is expected to be spent on CRM in 2010.

Some industries have seen a slew of never ending new developments and options for tackling and solving customer relationship management. This has often left those searching for a solution bewildered as to which direction they should go in. The last thing you want to do as a manager or business owner is spend good money on something that is actually going to slow down your business and make it more complicated. Sadly many of these CRM programs have appeared this way and have gone unused after companies have spent thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on them.

Clearly implementing a good customer management solution is essential to the survival and growth of your company, but in your search making sure you are moving ahead with a an easy to implement and use solution is crucial. Perhaps the best way to do this is first layout the goals you wish to achieve from your CRM and make sure whatever you choose as your solution ticks all the boxes.

Adeline Grosrenaud
Freelance Blog Writer

3229 Search

3229 is a new search engine that only searches pages from within the  UK Small Business Directory.

3229.co.uk provides a way for business owners to create poster style web pages completely free of charge, the pages are easy to set up, easily editable, and can be used to help promote the business owners own website.

To find out more visit the How to get listed in 3229 section, set up a listing and see how it works. It’s 100% free and if you don’t like your listing you cansimply delete it and all your information is removed from the system.

Google Street View UK

Went to have a look at google streetview  today http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/ but couldnd’t find any sign of street views in the UK.

Does anyone know how to get to google street view in the UK?

Google toolbar for chrome browser

Once anyone finds out where to get the google toolbar for chrome browser please let me know.

Low value traffic improve Alexa Rankings

I rently read a blog post about Alexa becoming worthless due to the fact its ranking system appears to be getting less accurate.

Personally, I have always liked Alexa, but maybe it’s because I know how to use it better than the people who critisise it do. I know it can be manipulated and is no good for proper tracking, but for keeping an eye on trends, monitoring specific sites and other uses, I found it very useful.

I also noticed the change in tracking recently, but have come up with a different conclusion to most. When using Alexa, I don’t only watch the traffic rankings, I also watch where visitors come from and what the traffic rank is in other countries.

On a lot of sites I monitor I have been noticing that general traffic rankings are dropping, but users from overseas is rising. Specific % rises are coming from previously under developed countries, India being a prime example.

One of my theories for why this is effecting Alexa rankings is the fact that Windows Vista is becoming more and more popular in the UK and is probably not as popular yet in developing countries. (must try and find a breakdown of % number of vista users in each country)

So why would this effect Alexa rankings? Simple really, as I write, the Alexa toolbar still isn’t available to Vista users.

What this means is visitors using older systems are still being tracked, but people with newer systems (using vista) are not.

As people using newer systems are generaly more affluant, site that receive poorer visitors will appear to be doing better in the Alexa rankings.

Comments are closed, but anyone who wants to post a comment email me at tj @ seo64.co.uk and I will add it for you.

Conference Centres Search Engine

After realising just how many conference centres we currently have listed in the database, I decided to create a very simple UK Conference Centres Search Engine.

It currently has over 5,000 UK conference centres listed and over the coming months their details will be updated and new conference centres will be added.

Business Continuity Management BCM

Business continuity management BCM is a process that helps organisations manage risks and ensures continuity of critical functions and effective recovery in the event of unexpected problems.

New bot coming from SAVVIS

One of my sites started getting hid hard a few months ago by a strange bot that appears to read javascript and therefore messes up both my Statcounter stats and my google AdSense stats. After a bit of searching around I discovered it was connected to Kavam.net, Limelight Networks, SearchME and that it was a new spider (Charlotte) from the visual search engine SearchMe

Yesterday I noticed a new visitor in my stats using the same set up, Mozilla 5.0 and Linux, but this time it was coming from a different IP ange 165.193.254.13 which appears to come from SAVVIS (SAVVIS Communications Corporation)

I posted about it on Jill Olkoski blog, and she has written more here, which is a better place to post comments or read more about any updates.

Profesional website design – under £300

Proof that you can get Profesional website design for under £300

Found a great site that demonstrates there are still talented website designers out there who don’t charge the earth.

searchme visual search

With visual sarch improving all the time how long will it be until it is in everyday use for searching? searchme are now opening up for beta testing