Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term used to describe the process of building a strong relationship with your customer by staying in touch with their activities and needs. This may include

Managing the intial sale
Touching base from time to time to ensure that the customer is satisfied with your services and that customer details are correct.
Offering your customer additional products and services.
Tracking customers who have left you (or may be about to) and bringing them back into the fold.
Tracking customers with a poor payment record and bringing them into line with your standard terms.

SMART provides you with a compact and powerful CRM subsystem. To access it, select \Customers \Customer Relationship Management from the Main Menu.

Customer Types

First a word about Customer Types. They are a powerful way of making sense out of your customer database. You can label a customer with one or more types and then search on them. For example you might have customer types called Major Customer and Refrigeration so that you can search your database for major refrigeration customers for a special promotion.

Customer Types are set up in the Customer Details window, in the box at lower right of the first tab. Right click in the box to select or delete a Customer Type.

To add new customer types, right click in the 'Select Customer Type' box.

Now you can use customer types when printing invoices or reports, or in the CRM window, to select a group of your customers.

The CRM window

To access the CRM window, select \Customers \Customer Relationship Management from the Main Menu.

In the upper part of this window you select filters which determine which customers are displayed. In the lower part of the window you have access to all information about each customer, including (if your access allows) operational and account information.

Filtering

The selections made in the Customer Types and States boxes at top right apply at all times (except when doing a customer search). To select a type or state, highlight it and press the space bar (press the space bar to deselect). If you don't make any selections, all types or states will be shown.

Reminder Filtering

Reminders may be created in this window or the Customer Details window. They are intended to remind you, for example, to call a customer about a promised payment.
To filter by reminder, choose the radio button at top left. By default outstanding reminders which are due on or before today are shown but you can vary this by changing the selections in the Reminders box.

Other Filters

You can select customers based on other criteria, e.g. customers with old outstanding invoices. Choose the Filter radio button at right, and then press the Select Filter button to see a list of filters. Select your choice and press OK.

Custom Filters

If you want to filter your customers by unusual criteria, for example to see only those who have had an alarm response on a Tuesday, contact Smart Support. Provided we have remote access to your system we can quickly create a Customer Type and apply it to these customers.

Searching for a Customer

Enter some text in the 'Search' box (lower right of the window). Customers with this text in their account number, company name, or address will be displayed. All other filters will be ignored.