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Tracking your customers

Douglas E. Welch

Small Business Gazette

COPYRIGHT 1999 Douglas E. Welch

Hello and welcome. Whether you already use computers in your small business, are looking to purchase one or just want to know what computers can do, this is place for you. Your small businesses can benefit greatly from the use of computers if you have the information and the advice to put them into action. This column will seek to provide exactly that information over the coming year.

In order to focus on your needs I need to hear from you. Please send your questions and/or problems to me c/o Small Business Gazette and I will incorporate them into upcoming articles. You can also reach me via Compuserve at 76625,3301 or the Internet at 76625.3301@compuserve.com. If the electronic addresses above are gibberish to you, don’t worry. An upcoming article on computer communications will clear that up. While I cannot answer each letter personally I will use them as the basis for future columns. Now, on with the show.

Most small businesses have a least one computer of some sort. Often it was purchased for one specific task such as bookkeeping or accounting. It is often never used for anything else. Don’t let these computers sit idle for 7 out of 8 hours a day. Exploit them to their fullest and make them an asset to your company. All it takes is a little time and knowledge.

A good first step for these computers is the development of a customer database. After all, if you don’t know who your customers are how can you hope to focus your advertising, follow up on sales or develop a market for new services. A customer database is like a large rolodex with some near magical features. It can be easily sorted, searched and used as the basis for mailing labels or personalized mailings. Using a database program can give your small company a strategic advantage that larger companies already have.

Database programs used to be hulking beasts with unfriendly interfaces that had to be interrogated ruthlessly to release any information. Worst of all, to get any real work done you had to write hundreds of lines of programming code to produce simple reports. Thanks to programs like Claris FileMaker Pro, MS Access and Symantec’s Q&A we now have databse programs that don’t require a rocket scientist to understand or operate.

Unfortunately, giving someone tools and teaching them how to use them are two different things. Most of our early ventures can turn into monsters that devour time, energy and sometimes data. Below are a few guidelines to insure that your database is useful and productive.

First, let’s tackle some basic database terminology. A database is a collection of records. Each record is like a card in your rolodex. Each card holds certain information about one particular person or company. The individual pieces of information on each card, name, address, city and state, are stored in fields on each record. A database is simply just a collection of records that are stored electronically instead of on paper.

The first step to creating a database is collecting the data you want to store. Break down this data into fields. Below is a sample set of fields for the rolodex database described above.

Date Entered

Date Updated

Company Name

Last Name

First Name -- Might also contain middle initial

Address --Street Address

Address 2 -- PO Box, Suite or Apt #

City

State

Zip Code

Phone 1 -- Home Phone

Phone 2 -- Business Phone

FAX

Notes -- A free form field for personal notes

Notice how certain information like the first and last name is separated into different fields. This allows you more flexibility in sorting and reporting on your data. If the name was stored in one field you would have difficulty sorting on just the last name or just the first name. The second address line provides additional space for a PO Box, suite or apartment number. Most people do not break fields down far enough yet it is almost impossible to break down fields too far. The general rule is that if you want to sort on a piece of data or print the information by itself, make it a separate field.

You might want to add other fields to this database according to your type of business. There could be fields for Last Sale, Amount of Last Sale, etc. These fields would allow you to target customers that haven’t purchased anything in the last 90 days or longer. Other fields could include birthdays, names of the customer’s spouse and children, anniversary dates, etc. that could be useful for sending out cards. The only limits on the use of your database is your own imagination.

Another important step in building your database is anticipating its size. Most rolodexes don’t have 1,000 records (cards) but mailing lists can grow to several times that size. While programs like those mentioned above can hold this amount of data they cannot necessarily handle it efficiently. The more information your database has the slower it will sort, search and print. Eventually you might require a more powerful database program or computer to keep up with your data. If you have designed your database carefully it should be easy to export your data (send it out of one program) and import it into a new system.

Finally, some database projects can be too large or complicated for these smaller database programs. Large projects may require the use of a relational database. These programs allow you to store data in separate files and then relate them to each other. Name and address might be held in one file while sales records are held in another. Programming would then allow you to search for the person’s name and report exactly how much they have purchased. These systems usually require programming and a significant investment of money and time. If you think you require this type of system it is best to seek help from a qualified database programmer. They can be hired to write the system for you or offer consulting if you decide to write it yourself.

While you cannot predict every contingency, you should make an effort to follow the guidelines above. Even though most database systems allow you to change the structure of your database, moving data from one field to another is usually a manual procedure. Try to make decisions beforehand that can save you trouble later. Nothing is more worthless than a database that doesn’t give you what you need.

Biography

Douglas E. Welch is a freelance writer, technology consultant and computer support analyst at a major entertainment firm in Southern California. He can be contacted via Compuserve at 76625,3301 or via the Internet at 76625.3301@compuserve.com