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Understanding Your Customers
The Benefits Of Understanding Your Customers Better
The Everyman Theatre introduced a range of technical and process changes, including a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system, to help improve its understanding of its customers.
The benefits it experienced include:
- Improved trading relationships - with customers, theatre companies, and other service providers such as printers and accountants.
- Reduced costs and greater efficiency - through better targeting of marketing efforts, which reduced the cost per sale; streamlined administration; and automation of the booking process.
- Improved competitiveness - through more effective marketing, better communication with theatre production companies, and a reputation for professionalism and advanced use of IT.
- More sales - the net result of all these improvements has been a tangible increase in sales. Revenue has more than doubled in the last five years.
What it could mean for your business...
Understanding your customers can bring benefits for businesses of all sizes in all sectors. Potential benefits can include:
Increased sales
- You can encourage existing customers to spend more by targeting them with appropriate offers and by spotting cross-selling opportunities.
More effective customer acquisition
- The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to identify new prospects and increase your customer base.
Improved efficiency
- If you have transaction, customer and billing details available centrally, it reduces error and speeds up transactions.
- If errors do occur they can be resolved more quickly and more satisfactorily.
- The more you know about customer demand, the more accurately you can predict buying patterns and stock requirements. Recent research
shows that companies which connect their client management functions to their supply chain applications are 81% more profitable than those that do not.1
Increased customer satisfaction
- Better access to customer information means that you can deal with customers faster and more appropriately.
- Tailored product offerings and personalised treatment will show customers that you value their business.
1 Deloitte Research, 2002
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