Here are several reasons why Customer Relationship Management matters more during a recession:
If any of this sounds interesting to you please contact us
With the economy worsening, now is the time to seriously consider Open Source when looking for technical solutions to improve your business. When the economy tightens businesses need to be even more efficient in how they do business. Costly proprietary solutions may execeed the budget tightening decisions that usually go with a tightening economy, so evaluting Open Source solutions start to make more sense.
More specifically, what you do not know about your existing and potential future customers is costing you business. A vast majority of organizations are unaware of their customer's purchasing habits, opinions, and preferences. If an organization is just armed with this information, then they have a much greater chance at:
This all falls under Customer Relationship Management. An organization improves its opportunity to be successful the more it knows about its customers. A CRM (Customer Relations Management) system is a technical solution that aims to help organizations capture this information.
Do you think that a CRM system would be useful for you and your organization, or do you think it would be a waste of effort? Respond and let us know.
Is Open Source part of your business strategy? What do I mean by that? I mean... When you investigate business solutions and software to help your business grow, do you include open source among the options that you investigate?
If it is you probably are already reaping the surprising benefits that open source yields. Look here to find out what those benefits are if you have never considered open source as and option for your company before
Recently one of my clients was hit with the Vundo virus. This virus can most variants of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows XP), however it is unknown if it can affect Windows Vista as of yet. This Trojan progam is a component of an adware program that downloads and displays pop-up advertisements. It is known to be installed by visiting a Web site link contained in a spammed email. The client who received this trojan program lost more than a day and a half of productivity due to this trojan program.
I am not going to go into great detail about this trojan program, but I will talk about the loss of productivity experienced because of the downtime trying to eradicate the issue. What are most organizations doing to ensure that they do not experience this type of downtime? Do they have active policies in place to make sure that they do not lose this much time? Should they re-exam the privileges they allow their workforce when using their workstations?
Most of the time these issues can be avoided, however, sometimes these types of problems just happen. Besides locking all system functionality and pulling these systems off the net, companies will be dealing with these issues forever. My fear is that most companies will not take this as seriously as they should unless they seriously think about the cost of downtime experienced because of a virus or trojan program. Luckily for this client the issue only effected one employee. How much would the impact be if this affected the whole organization? That's what companies and business owners should be thinking about...