Customer Relations are ever growing, a CRM must provide Management as well.  Punishing customers for loyalty is the inevitable consequence of not acknowledging and preparing for a long term relationship with your customers.  Destroying your customer’s long term experience increases churn and kills your net-dollar retention.

Saving long term customers requires work and planning from the frontend to the persistence layer.

Here is one strategy for each layer to help get you started:

1. Frontend: Dashboards over pagination.
2. Backend: Historical limits by default.  
3. Persistence: Data partitioning.  

Dashboards Over Pagination

New customers can see all of their contacts on one page.  Same for their marketing campaigns, tags, and deals.  That changes very quickly for customers who are using your system.  When customers can’t see all of their data on a single page, the solution isn’t pagination, you need dashboards.

When your customers go to their contacts, you could show them “Page 1 of 10”, or you could show them a dashboard with contact activity.  New contact counts, engagement rates, contacts who need a follow up.

A pagination is about databases, it is a terrible interface for getting things done.  Make your CRM about management and workflows with dashboards.

Historic Limits By Default

Add sensible defaults to everything to limit the amount of data searched.  Default to showing the last 6 months or 1 year of a customer’s interactions.  Keep the older data accessible, but don’t waste the user’s time loading history.

Put another way, how many extra seconds should you make customers wait to find out if a contact opened an email 3 years ago?  The correct answer is 0 seconds, and also 0 milliseconds; update your APIs accordingly.

Data partitioning

Event logs keep track of every email open, click, and website visit.  Because events rarely get deleted, these tables grow and grow with your customers.  Over time, the amount of data in the tables will cause queries to become slow.  The more successful your customers get, the worse your database problems become!

Partitioning directs the database to create different logical tables based on a key while presenting a view of the combined table.  Events are date based making them great candidates for partitioning by month or year.  The previous tip, Historic Limits By Default, places an upper bound on the data in a table scan.

Conclusion

Customer data accumulates over time, especially in CRMs.  Keeping customers for years requires preventing your system from punishing them for accumulating data.  Failing to address the problems will destroy the customer’s experience, increase churn, and reduce your net-dollar retention.

These three strategies will help you start thinking about data accumulation and how customer needs change over time.  Don’t throw away your loyal customers because your systems only consider the new user experience!