Tools For Targeting Customer Service

Nation's Business, Nov 1, 1998 by Tim McCollum

Database software can help you tailor your approach to customers, improve your service, and thereby enlarge your bottom line.

Terry Boyle gets customers to come back--and it's a computerized database that helps him do it. Boyle is vice president of Game-Set-Match, a tennis-services firm in Englewood, Colo. He says the company has increased its revenues at an average annual rate of 45 percent over the past four years by focusing on existing customers for repeat sales and by providing personalized service.

The company's vast database of customer information makes this marketing approach possible, he says.

Generating repeat business costs less than attracting new customers and a lot less than winning back dissatisfied customers. So it's important for growth-oriented small firms such as Game-Set-Match to concentrate on giving buyers reasons to return, says Claudio Marcus, vice president of marketing with Target-Smart! Inc., a marketing-software company in Denver.

The database at Game-Set-Match tracks the buying behavior of every person who takes lessons from the firm, plays in one of the leagues it organizes, or makes a purchase in its small retail shop-a total of more than 10,000 people in 4,800 families.

"The use and marketing of our database has kept us ahead of the competition," says Boyle. "We can target-search our customer base. If there's a program we need to promote, such as a league, we can look up who was in that league last year and put a notice out to that particular group."

One-To-One Marketing

Donna Fluss, a research director at Gartner Group, a technology consulting company based in Stamford, Conn., says, "The more you know about your customers, the more effective you'll be at increasing their value to your organization."

Fluss says that every contact that a company has with its customers is an opportunity to impress them with its service. Customer databases help companies do this by providing employees with quick, convenient access to relevant information before they call customers. Such information includes previous purchases, questions asked, and problems incurred.

This form of relationship marketing- sometimes called one-to-one marketing-is a strategy that large firms have been using for more than a decade to increase customer retention. Now small businesses can hold their own with their big-business competitors by using point-of-sale, database, contact-management, call-center, and customer-service and support software.

Boyle started automating Game-Set-Match's database two years ago as a way to pinpoint marketing campaigns better. At the time, the company was advertising in local newspapers and through mass mailings. But that scattershot approach wasn't giving Boyle the results he wanted.

After trying a variety of database programs, he set up a customer-management system by combining the company's POS*IM point-of-sale software, from Ensign Systems Inc. in Salt Lake City, with TouchBase Pro, a contact-management program from Now Software Inc., since acquired by Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego. TouchBase Pro has been superseded by software called Now Up-to-Date and Contact.

The system runs over a network of five Macintosh desktop computers and two Apple PowerBook portables.

Boyle says the customer database has made Game-Set-Match's marketing campaigns more effective and cost-efficient. By searching the database, Game-Set-Match has attracted players and students to its retail stores to buy equipment and get repairs. In addition, the firm has used the database to sign up retail customers for lessons and tennis leagues.

Companies should segment their databases to determine who their frequent and big-spending customers are and then pamper those customers and give them better values, advises TargetSmart's Marcus, co-author of TargetSmart!: Database Marketing for the Small Business (The Oasis Press, $19.95).

Game-Set-Match has used its database to identify customers who frequently make purchases and to target these "gold" customers through a newsletter and special offers.

"We have tennis players that we've gotten to know on a personal basis," Boyle says. "They have come to expect to receive our newsletter. And they expect the post card mailings and a phone call to follow up."

From Card Files To Computers

Janitorial-services contractor USA Clean Inc., based in Springfield, Ill., used to keep its customer list on index cards. Now it maintains a database of more than 16,000 customer contacts in contact-management software called Goldmine from Goldmine Software Corp. in Pacific Palisades, Calif.

USA Clean's owner, Bruce Bushert, made the switch in 1991 when it became too cumbersome to keep track of the firm's growing clientele through the manual filing system.

The Goldmine software, which was in its first version at the time, enabled the company to store information on customers and keep a record of what the firm had done for them.

Over the years, as the software was updated, USA Clean automated its telemarketing and customer correspondence as well. Bushert and other employees can draft and print letters directly from the software, and the program reminds them when they should follow up.