The most important notion in any type human interactions be that a business or a personal life is ability to build and maintain good relationships with people around you. The most important people for your business are your customers. Building and maintaining quality relationship with customers is the key for success of any business.

Your knowledge of customers is based on the “bits and peaces” of information that are passed around in your daily interactions with them. What happens with these “bits and peaces” after your customers has left for the day? Do you manage to retain your customers? Do you know why your customer came or went or why? In other words do you make business decisions based solely on the “gut feeling” or solid analysis supported with data and knowledge.

The database technology will help you to identify your loyal customers and repeat purchasers and one-time-only “triers” that you should try to make into “repeat purchasers”. The Open ASP project is aiming to create a system that collects and analyses customer information (with your help of course!) and helps you target specific benefits to specific customer and provides means for accurate measurement of the results.

What a well managed CRM database can do for your business?

• Better understand and measure the profile of your existing customers
• Find a better match for your products and services to customers’ wants and needs
• Help find new customers or use new advertising/distribution channels that fit the profile of existing customers
• Make offers to customers as personal as possible
• Help to improve your interaction with your current and prospective customers
• Tell you when the best time and place is for an advertising campaign or promotion
• Measure response to your promotion efforts and help account for the results.
• Demonstrate that a friendship with customers is a valuable asset.

What do you do to create a database?

STEP 1 Define the purpose

The first step in developing a customer information system using Open ASP services is definition of the purpose and the goal of the actions.

Any business engaging into a market information collection project must first develop clear answers to the following question.

STEP 2. Develop the process

There is no much use of a technology tools if they are not used. In order to bring benefits to your business a customer information system must be integrated into your business.

The following actions must be taken:

Train sales personnel on entering data into the database Assign managerial level employee to maintaining quality and integrity of the data in the database (or do it yourself).
Assign managerial level employee to develop monthly and quarterly reports and analysis on the gathered data.
Possibly incorporate the use of the database into your promotional campaigns. (Example: Every product you sell may be accompanied with a special ID number printed inside the package. Customer enter this number to access the database on your web site, enter their personal (valuable) data and receive a possible prize)

STEP 3. Develop the database.

Contact Open ASP representative at (OpenASP contact information goes here) to get a password and login to protected/secure web site hosted at the Open ASP facilities. (Note: Your password will be known only to you and people you give it to, so keep it safe).

• A unique identifier such as an ID or a match code
• Name and title of the customer
• Address and telephone of the customer
• Demographic data (age, sex, occupation, etc..)
• History of customers interactions with your business (inquiries, purchases, etc..)

STEP 4 Collect the data.

Creation of a quality database takes time and patience. One cannot expect to get serious results from database activities with in one or two weeks.

Moreover in order to get the real benefit from your customer information database you need to update, maintain and add to it continuously.

STEP 5 Prepare and analyze the data

The range of answers the data will provide to you depends on the questions you ask and your skill at statistical analysis and data mining*.

Analysis may range from simple queries like:
• identify existing customers who have birthdays within next month
to intermediary analysis using regressions and clustering like:
• What is the pre-dominant occupation in my most affluent and loyal customer group.
• What is the most important characteristic of the product for this group.
• What is the forecast for sales for next month.
to advanced data mining and forecasting techniques like:
• Identify the customers that have 85% probability of buying product B given that they have bought product A and are students.

Open ASP team is intends to develop and easily customizable functionality for the queries and statistical analysis, so that a person without special statistical knowledge can make the analysis and derive value.

Every two or three weeks we will be posting a detailed step by step guides and HOW TO manuals for performing analysis here (Link to HOW TO page goes here).
-> Please contact Open ASP team if you like us to help you analyzing your database

STEP 6 Report the finding and develop strategic recommendations

The last and probably the most important step in order to derive value from the customer information database is developing and implementing strategic and tactical decision on how to better run your business*.
Your decision and actions will depend greatly on the line of business you are in. Some examples of these are:

• Introduction or dropping of a product line
• Changes in your design and implementation of your promotional campaign
• Changes in your post-sale support

Open ASP team will be posting sample business cases on how different companies we work with have derived value from Customer Databases here (link to business cases and success stories goes here)

If you would like to have OpenASP team to help you develop strategic recommendations on improving your business strategy contact us.