CIM- customer Information management refers to the practice of managing customer data for your business. Just like every company, customers are at the core of your business and they are your most important assets.
Maintaining consistency in storing customer information in a manual process is simply impossible to do. Keeping a tab on every customer with all their preferences with every new order and service is not feasible in a manual structure. You definitely need to opt for a good CRM- Customer Relationship Management.
CRM is different from CIM. CRM is basically a tool using which you perform CIM. But why do you need CIM in the first place? Let’s understand this better from your customers’ perspective. Assume that you have a customer who is a regular client and has a preference of getting his clothes ironed and packed on a hanger rather than folded. You have been attending to him for years, hence you are aware of his choices.
But, once this customer was attended by one of your staff as you were not present in the shop. As expected, the customer didn’t mention his preferences assuming his past experience and the staff is unaware of this preference as there is no information of customer likings to help deliver a consistent service.
At the time of delivery, it is going to be an unpleasant experience for everyone involved- the customer, your staff and you too. Does this remind you of any instance? Good, if it did, even better if you didn’t because you can completely avoid such scenarios from happening.
On the contrary, let’s consider the same situation wherein the customer visits to drop off the garments and your staff is notified of the customer’s past preferences. Before confirming the order, your staff reconfirms with the customer if he would like to get his garments delivered as per his preference in the past. It would be an amazing moment of great service for your customer, as irrespective of your presence, your brand delivers consistent service to delight the customers.
Customer information management for dry cleaners/launderers like you, isn’t just limited to doing wonders for your customers but it does for you too to help you expand your business. To expand your business, you need more customers and to get more customers you need to understand your customers better and this is where CIM does its magic.
Understand your customers better
CIM can store extensive information about your customers, about their choices and services taken from you. This information is extremely important in understanding the expectations of your customers towards their dry cleaners. To be exact, you can use your customer’s contact information to connect with your customers and take feedback from them to use it for improving their experience.
Maintain consistent service
Good service is directly related to customer loyalty. Deliver good service to earn customer loyalty. Deliver a bad service, you risk losing not just one, but at least 3 more future customers. Nothing is more important for customers than to feel valued by a brand. Maintaining a consistent level of service to every customer every time brings in loyalty and brand value to you. 74% of customers say that they invest or buy from a brand based on the word of mouth opinion about it. Consistent service also helps you avoid customer complaints.
Strong base for better decisions
Taking the right decisions is a battle half won. Making decisions backed by gut feeling instead of data is set to fail. CIM isn’t just to deliver value to customers, but also to smartly use that value to take business decisions to boost your growth. For example, a set of customers might have dropped their number of orders per month. Now, this kind of information is vital while taking key decisions such as running discounts or offers. If this set is a small number maybe you can run an offer specifically for them. But, in case it’s a bigger number you can promote an offer for all customers to engage them with your brand and services.
Here, the most important things to consider are, firstly, that you get a precise information about the amount that needs to be invested and secondly, when do you need to run this kind of offer. Right action on right time is the key to success.
Get efficient to be productive
Customer information management for dry cleaners holds significance as it can give you a bird’s eye view of your profile. It helps you analyze who are your customers and whom should you be targeting. Automating the information maintenance and analysis with managing your highest paying customers and your least paying customers. This information can completely turn around your business, as you need to retain these high paying customers at any cost. This is also known as the 80/20 rule. As per this rule- 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. This 20 % of customers are identified from CIM. There is no other way to get this information without maintaining a customer database. Once you have the data, you are smart enough to use it wisely.
To run a business successfully, customers are a primary requirement. But if you don’t tap into the needs and expectations of your customers, someone else will. Nowadays, understanding your customers and adapting your strategy as per them is the crux of any successful business. Wasting on your customer’s requirement can cost you big time, more than you can anticipate. Hence, to be successful and boost your growth, invest in a CIM to get the best out of your customers.
