Email Relationship Management and CRM

CRM is jargon for Customer Relationship Management. Great big companies use this a lot. They buy great big, sophisticated systems. Sometimes these systems don't work very well, but they're always big and sophisticated. They're the system that lets the person at the Call Center for your bank have information about your recent transactions that occurred in the branch or at the ATM or over the phone. When it works well, CRM lets us interact with businesses in ways that are more pleasant and more effective.

The problem is that there isn't much of this around for small-store Web sites. The packages that produce CRM for large businesses are frightfully expensive, even on their giant budgets. What's been developing in the last couple of years, though, is an alternative to giant CRM programs that even small stores can afford and use.

The basic idea is that most of the contact that happens through Web-based interaction happens using e-mail. And if we could structure a way for e-mail to be handled easily, we could then go a long way toward improving our overall relations. That's what programs like CosmoTracker do.

CosmoTracker is the first of a new class of programs that will give you a way to do several things with e-mail that help you use it more effectively for managing your customer relations.

One problem for many small stores is that they have no convenient way to route incoming email to the proper person and then oversee whether it's answered in a timely way. CosmoTracker gives you a way to do that easily and effectively.

The program will also let you prepare automated responses -- autoresponders -- that you can use to send back replies immediately when people request information. It will keep a record of what was sent and to whom, so that you can follow up, while meeting your customer's need for immediate information.

The program will also let you use boilerplate or semi-structured replies to more complex inquiries. This cuts down the time you'll spend on the email component of marketing and customer service.

On the horizon (promised this month, in fact) is a feature to allow you to have one or several mailing lists and manage them more easily than you manage your paper mail. With this feature you can send email newsletters to designated groups of customers without investing in expensive mailing list software and for about the cost of mailing list services.

This is the most effective product I've ever seen for handling the business tasks of email and for using email to improve marketing and customer relations. It's also the only program I've seen like it, though I'm sure others are under development.

I've asked the developer, Terry Woodward, if he'd offer NAMM folks a special deal on the package and he's agreed. To find out the details, just go to his NAMM Special Site.

Let's wrap up with an idea of what you should do right now.

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