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Your Infomation

Most people in business are aware of the importance of cash flow, customer care, product quality, and recruiting and looking after your staff. But strangely in the information age one area often overlooked by businesses is the quality of their information flow.

What do we mean by this?

When a customer places an order, that customer has given you information. How that information is collected, stored, reported and acted upon will make a difference in the bottom line of your company.

What is an example of quality information collection and flow?

Loyalty cards (Nectar, Club Card etc) Why do they want you to have them? So they can gather information on shopping habits of their shoppers.   A wide range of detailed information on what people are buying, where they are coming from, how much is their average spend, how often do they shop, what sort of offers do they go for, what is important to them - price or quality? etc etc etc.

The layout of their store, the offers they put on, the products they stock, the amount they order, the marketing they do - it's all based on the information they have.  When they decide to build a new store they already know it will be a success. Tesco markets on price, Marks & Spencers on quality.

Look at the government. How they gather and act upon and control the flow of information is important in many ways. They acted upon certain information they had about Iraq. They decide when to release information to the public about events. They even lose it in the post!!!

So my question to you all is how good is your information flow? How good is the quality of the information you have in your business? And what difference does it make?

Well the best way to highlight this is with a few examples.

I was working with a brewery who were trying to sell some new branded garden furniture to its pubs. Unfortunately at that time the quality of information available to them was poor. The end result was they were trying to sell garden furniture to pubs with no gardens!! But did the company have the information stored somewhere? Of course it did, but this wasn't made available to the sales team. So two things occurred - the professionalism of the brewery was called into question, and also time was wasted by the sales team calling up people who they had no hope of selling to. One of the things they then went on to do was gather information about the pubs so they could make sure their marketing was tailored.

A television facilities company who hired out cameras and equipment to film crews basically kept everything out with a client on a paper system but often the paper work would get lost. Some clients could have the kit for weeks or month and have over 200 pieces. IF some of it did not come back the company often did not know and was losing thousands of pounds worth of kit every year.

Also if some kit was found to be damaged then of they were not sure which client had had the kit. Simply by introducing an electronic check in check out system they were able to know where every piece of kit was at any moment in time and reduced their kit loss and uncharged damage cost dramatically.

A training company used to give out quotes over the phone for training, but these were never required and often when the client did come back the company was having to ask the client what the quote price was. Its pretty obvious how bad it looked or the financial implications there were.

One of the common issue we always come across is duplicated information, different people recording the same information in different places. Which some of it will be out of date, time is being wasted and relevant information is not being shared. Time is often wasted as well locating relevant documents because they data is not all in one place. Also its difficult for multiple people to be accessing the same information at once.

Most of these summarise to wasting time finding things, duplicating effort, losing money because you are not quite sure what you had or what you hired out, and looking unprofessional, giving poor customer service.

But lets also look at the other side of the coin. Going back to the brewery they used their mistake to implement as system which gathered good quality information about the pubs. They asked their customers what they had, what sort of events they put on, what they were interested in. The system was built built so that each time they took an order they asked a couple of questions as they built the relationship. Now not only did they stop marketing to those who were not sensible they were able to target market using the information they had. They saved money there and got better returns. But this information was also gathered to measure the campaigns success and tweak it next time.

It also helped the sales team build a good rapport with the client, making sure they were doing everything they could. Information was shared across the departments so they had all the information they need. They now saved money, made more money from effective marketing and a better relationship with their client.

The training company now recorded everything better and had the quote figures to hand. They also recorded all the courses who went on them what feedback was given. They were able to offer monthly reports to client of their activity saving the client having to do the leg work. They created a better relationship but once again had better information for marketing to the current client. When new courses came in they new the type of clients that would be interested.

The television facilities company not only stopped their loss and looked more professional they again were able to create reports of their customers and what they had done for marketing. They also created a visual system not only to aid the warehouse staff but to show to potential clients the professional work they were doing. This was used in marketing literature.

So how does it benefit?

• Saving time which is often being waste.
• Saving money which can be lost by not knowing what was going where.
• Looking more professional because the information was at your fingertips.
• Being able to build more effective relationships with clients and know how you can serve them better and therefore make more money.
• Being able to more effectively market because you have looked at the current clients and been able to profile them properly.

Now often people are sold on this idea but of course there is a cost to implement and they suck in their breath and there’s the sticking point. Its going to cost isn’t it?

Not necessarily, for smaller companies straight forward off the shelf packages can do the job for them, gold mine ACT etc and used correctly can fulfil all the criteria.

Yes the bigger the company and depending what they do there may be a need for customised software to be written, and yes there will be a time and cost commitment. But it literally is an investment which when done correctly will yield far greater returns.

It will even help recruitment and retention because your staff can see you know what you are doing and are professional.

We are in the Information age so are you making the most of the information you have? Is the information flow within your business making you money or losing you time and money. Is it helping you build relationships with your customers and more effectively market.

The better the relationship you can build with your customers, the more effective marketing you can do, the streamlined you can be in handling information about all aspects of your business then you will have a competitive edge over your rivals who are not doing the same.