Guardian SMB supplement, October 2008. Sue Tabbitt
Subject: old-fashioned CRM

* ALL FEATURES ARE COPYRIGHT PROTECTED AND BELONG TO THE MAGAZINE THAT COMMISSIONED THE WORK. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MUST THIS CONTENT BE USED ELSEWHERE BY ANY OTHER PARTY.

For every user of fancy 'customer relationship management' software, there are probably 50 businesses managing perfectly well with index cards and speed-dial.

Take Alvin Connor, manufacturer of natural body care products in Speake, Liverpool. Owner Alvin Cooney is an old-school sales manager, whose trusty black box of contacts stays very close to his chest.

The business is small, with five employees. Although it has 2,000 retail customers, Alvin Connor handles only the top tier of 30; the rest are handled by distributors, who make up the balance of Cooney's 50-60 contact cards.

Asked what would happen if his black box was left on a train, stolen, or lost to a fire, Cooney claims not to be too worried. "I do have a Blackberry with contacts stored on it, and there's a client file for notes," he says.

While he concedes that the company may grow to a point where a more centralised, computer-based system will be unavoidable, Cooney won't part easily with his little black box. "It's simple, tried and tested, and portable," he says. "Everything I need is there in black and white and it comes with me everywhere. It doesn't need batteries or fall prey to viruses."

Sometimes computers just get in the way. For many small businesses, good customer relationship management is all about the personal touch.

Christine Browning, owner and MD of Special Feetures [sic], a specialist shoe provider near Kingston-upon-Thames, admits that her company's approach to CRM is more 'state of the ark' than state of the art. That's despite handling over 6,000 customers.

Special Feetures - there's a clue in the name - specialises in women's shoes for long and narrow feet (a sister company offers sizes of 8+). Repeat sales are very strong. But for Browning, this has everything to do with what she is selling, and how the firm works with its customers, and has very little to do with IT-based prompting, despite the fact that the majority of business is done remotely, by mail order.

Special Feetures stores customer details in a simple Microsoft Access database. "We need a database of customer records to get the money in, but there's no database for marketing," Browning notes. "We've looked many times at moving on, but we're on the phone a lot to our customers - we don't need to segment them for marketing purposes."

Just as uniquely shaped feet can't be squeezed into any old shoe, Browning's business can't be forced into a CRM template. Yet Special Feetures does a lot with its Access database. Since it has to keep account records for six years for VAT purposes, the system by default contains a lot of useful historical information about customers' purchasing history, which can be called up quickly and easily using each client's unique reference number. Each of the company's six dedicated staff can access these records if they need to. Notes jotted down during a customer call are added to the Access database as plain text, using the company's own short-hand.

For the time being, Browning has no intention of upgrading to a proper CRM system as she feels it could detract from the personal touch the firm has worked so hard to cultivate.

Indeed, the business has engendered such an intimate feel to it that most customers assume it handles only a couple of hundred of account. "They'll casually ring up to see if their order has come in, saying 'Can I speak to Shirley - she knows my feet,'," Browning laughs. "With their postcode, we can soon find out, but they'd be shocked to realise we're a £750,000-turnover business that distributes shoes all over the world."

Box copy:

Handy tools for old-fashioned CRM on the cheap:

" Loose-leaf business card holders - stores up to 120 business cards. Simply write notes on the back.
o Price: £5.99 each (www.viking-direct.co.uk)

" Card indexes - simple record cards kept in a flip-top box. Infinitely scalable and easy to update.
o Viking Direct card index boxes from £2.69 each (www.viking-direct.co.uk)

" A4 To Do Book - permanent carbonless record book with constant duplication
o Price: £3.78 (Staples)

" Adam Carbonless Sales Invoice Forms (Duplicate) - manual invoicing system with a unique numbering system
o Price: £3.99 (Staples)

" Cardscan Business Card Scanner - 'reads' business cards, using a USB port to scan them directly onto smartphones, pocket PCs and desktop machines, and can synchronise with Outlook, ACT!, Notes and Goldmine.
o Price £157.97 (www.totalofficesupplies.co.uk)

Word of warning:

By all means keep your CRM activities simple, but beware of potential risks eg:

" Regulatory requirements which demand that records are kept for a number of years - typically 6-7 (eg VAT requirements). Data Protection requirements are also important, governing the way customer data is handled.
" If valuable customer data stays with an individual, consider how the business would be affected if that person wasn't there.
" What if the office was subject to a fire, flood or burglary, or a contact book or phone was left on a train? Is your customer data backed up anywhere?

[