Precision Reloading Inc., in Stafford Springs, Conn., sells skeet-shooting equipment and supplies. Its target is the kind of offbeat, narrowly focused market that engenders a certain camaraderie among enthusiasts -- a bond that Precision nurtures. "Our customers love to talk and talk," says Cindy Maffei, vice-president of the nine-employee business.
Until three years ago, Cindy and her husband, Peter, the company president, filled out order forms on a typewriter, and Cindy kept the customer database in her head. She didn't do a bad job, either, claims Peter. But as sales rose toward the $1-million mark and the cost of PCs kept falling, the Maffeis decided to jump into technology with both feet. Forty thousand dollars later, Precision is relying on eight IBM PCs, including a network server, to manage its finances, process orders, track inventory, and design its catalog.
As part of the transformation, Cindy turned over her cerebral database to Q&A, a database-management software program from Symantec, in Cupertino, Calif. It's still up to Cindy to talk the customers up, but now the computer provides more than a little support. While the customer is schmoozing about clay pigeons, Cindy is looking at an on-screen report of the caller's history of purchases, returns, special requests, complaints, and any other details that bear tracking.
Besides helping Cindy give more personal service, the system helps cut down on bad risks by tracking, for example, COD order returns. And sometimes it even tells Cindy a little more than she can share. There was, for example, the man who asked that his order be shipped to his office so his wife wouldn't know about it -- unaware that his wife had called a few weeks earlier to place an order she wanted shipped to her office. "I'd never tell," says Cindy.
Clearly, it's better to know too much about your customers and keep quiet about it than it is to make it plain that you don't know enough.
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Jennifer deJong (jdejong@mcimail.com) is a freelance writer based in Boston.
IMPROVING CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR THE CRUCIAL FEW
Law firms, consulting firms, and other professional-service firms often get the lion's share of their revenues from a handful of clients. In that situation, identifying and tracking customers' concerns aren't difficult. When such companies use information technology, they usually do it to add depth to their customer service.
That's what architectural-lighting firm Fisher Marantz Renfro Stone Inc. did. The 20-employee company was riding high in the mid- to late 1980s, when a booming economy led many organizations to undertake all sorts of construction and renovation projects. But when budget axes fell in the 1990s, the $3-million New York-based firm found it had to cut fees by as much as 25% to compete with low-cost one- and two-person shops.
To keep meeting and travel costs down and service up, Fisher Marantz has persuaded some of its clients to conduct business on-line. The company started with E-mail and then began sending electronic blueprints to customers' computers -- 35¢ and 20 seconds a blueprint, compared with about $25 and 24 hours for overnight delivery.
Now the company is introducing clients to a new level of linking up. While browsing through a magazine, partner Richard Renfro stumbled on an ad for a $249 software program called TALKShow, from Future Labs Inc., in Los Altos, Calif. The program lets clients dial into one of Fisher Marantz's PCs and call up designs on their own computer screen. Now instead of waiting for clients' responses to proposed designs, Fisher Marantz's employees can discuss works in progress over the phone with clients and make suggested changes while both parties are looking at the design on their screens.
Renfro notes that the new approach isn't intended to replace face-to-face time with clients. Rather, it offers them an opportunity to have real input into the design process. He says six clients have embraced the TALKShow program so far; he hasn't mentioned it to the rest yet, suspecting they might not be ready to make the technological leap. "They should be ready by now," he says. "But I want to break the news gently." After all, it isn't customer service if you have to ram it down their throats.
GETTING STARTED
First Things First: The first step in designing a customer-service database is to ask some basic questions. What kind of support are you going to offer? Are you sufficiently staffed to answer the phones? What kind of information will your phone reps need to respond to customer calls? Where is that information currently stored?
The Electronic Future: Make sure the technology you invest in will work with the computers and databases you already have. While you may not need to link all your computers today, in the long run it makes more sense to have information you need fed directly into your computer than to have your assistant furnish you with paper reports.
The Long-Range Plan: Your immediate need is to use technology to help you answer your customers' questions. The ultimate goal is to mine their comments for business intelligence: information you can analyze and use to grow your company.
The Low-Tech Touch: Remember that the best ways to make your customers happy are still low-tech and old-fashioned. Used wisely, technology can help you offer that personal touch. Don't go so high-tech that your customers feel alienated.
Resources
For most small and midsize companies, the best way to build a customer-service database is to have a local consultant or computer reseller customize a PC database. Expect to pay anywhere from $60 to $100 an hour for the service, and expect it to take from a dozen to a few hundred hours.
A handful of software vendors makes products dedicated to managing customer-service operations. Those programs -- from the Vantive Corp., in Mountain View, Calif. (800-582-6848) and Answer Systems Inc., in San JosÉ, Calif. (800-677-2679), among others -- do a sophisticated job of tracking, escalating, and responding to calls. More important, they are designed to analyze customer data and feed the data strategically throughout the company. To date, however, the programs are geared toward very large companies. Costs to get them up and running range from a low of $50,000 to a high of about $500,000.
