Imagine the benefits of having all your customer and prospect information integrated into one instantly accessible electronic program.

With intelligence about customer habits, buying histories, and preferences at your fingertips, you can react to sales opportunities faster and more efficiently.

You can check accounts and outcomes of customer interactions anywhere you go—say, before heading into a sales call—with online access and a Web browser.

You can identify trouble spots early and smooth the pain before a customer walks.

You can use the program to trigger messages. For instance, if a customer buys a high-ticket item, send an automatic e-mail thank you. Or, for a new customer, e-mail a short survey about the customer experience so you can learn of any possible improvements.

A free customer relationship program such as Contact Manager in Office Live Small Business can tell you all that and more. So satisfying customer needs gets a whole lot easier. And that translates into bigger and better business for you.

Read on for these steps on how to digitize your customer and business contacts and how to use this data to leverage sales and marketing efforts.

Step 1: Create an in-house electronic customer list

Like most businesses, you likely already have much of the bits and bytes of customer info you need.

But just as likely, that information is scattered on a few computer hard drives, your PDA, mobile phone, and in hard-copy files. What most owners lack is an easy way to review or access the data in one spot.

The solution is to create your own customer database, whether by using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or Access 2007. You'll want to digitize all existing customer data, collect any additional information you may need (see the suggested list below), and continue to collect and update information about new and existing customers at each point of contact. (You can secure permission by requesting a prospect to register online or by sending out an opt-in e-mail notice.)

The goal, as explained in Step 2, is to import all new and updated information into an easy-to-use customer relationship program such as Contact Manager. If you already have a good deal of your customer information in electronic form, it will be easier to import it into the customer relationship software. If not, it will require a bit of time and effort to scan or enter what you have in paper form.

The most helpful information to collect includes:

• Name, address, phone, and/or e-mail address—including family members, company title and department—depending on the kind of business you have;

• Date of birth, so you can send out cards or e-mail messages with birthday discount offers or gifts;

• Annual amount spent with your company;

• Products owned and purchase history;

• Dates or schedule of purchases;

• Special offers acted upon;

• Customer service history;

• Special requests for products or service or and other general feedback;

• Participation in promotional events and loyalty programs.

Step 2: Import customer profiles into a customer relationship program

Next, migrate the information into an application such as Contact Manager, which will give you the ability to quickly collect, store, and manipulate your customer data.

Such programs typically have preformatted templates and fields, so you can quickly input data, and update customer profiles. This is important, because if it’s easy to update your customer software, you will always be up-to-speed about orders and sales leads.

Using such software, get in the habit of consistently updating your customer information. Integrate this into training for existing and new employees. Make sure they understand when and how to update customer profiles (i.e., at every point of contact), and what information they should strive to include. Naturally, make sure employees understand why this is important to the business.

At each customer touch point, try to learn a little more or verify what you have. For instance, ask why the customer is buying two instead of one. Why does he choose blue rather than gray? Has she been promoted, with a new title and responsibilities? Note the customer's responses to marketing efforts.

After several interactions, you'll have insights into an individual account’s purchasing history and proprietary profile. You’ll have it captured in a centralized location—no more outdated sticky notes or multiple folders with conflicting information.

Plus, all the actionable information will be accessible for marketing or billing purposes.

Beyond basic contact information, customer relationship programs also can serve up different views of the information and customer histories, such as who’s buying what, how well they pay, and more.

Contact Manager, for instance, consolidates all interactions for a given customer, including e-mail messages, tasks, appointments or sales calls, notes, and other documents.

Cool tip: Contact Manager can also create customized reports with criteria of your own choosing and, if needed, export those reports into Microsoft Office Excel for spreadsheet analysis.

Step 3: Learn more about your best customers

By using these reports, you can quickly discover the profile of your best customers.

For instance, your best buyers might have a certain age range, or tend to buy in the summer, or come from a certain region.

Armed with that beginning profile, fill in details to hone your marketing efforts and prospect for more customers with just those characteristics.

An expedient way to get additional details about prospects and customers is by sending out a e-newsletters with a call to action or a survey.

Cool tip: Contact Manager can export customer information into Microsoft Office Word 2007 or Publisher 2007, so you can create e-newsletters or surveys on the fly and then automatically send them out.

Just make sure you have enough responses to your survey to figure out what really moves customers to buy. You may need to send a few mailings. That response rate, of course, depends on how many customers you have. A good average would be roughly 10 percent of your customer list.

Tip: For more about personalizing your pitch, see this article.

Step 4: Engage your customers with high-level services and attention

Now that you've delved into what makes your best buyers tick, you're ready to surprise and delight the customer.

Some ideas for you:

• Set up a program that automatically offers a promotion based on a customer’s first sale or a discount for the customer’s next purchase. Don’t forget to request a prospect’s permission to maintain this e-mail list. Get more info from Reports  in Office Live Small Business, which tracks how many people visit your site, what pages they view and more.

• Send e-news with special offers and promotions that are geared to exactly what the customers has bought in the past.

• A realtor might send personalized e-news for her client list about market trends or new properties. Of course, make sure this only goes out to the buyers who are actively house-hunting so you don't annoy future prospects.

• A business-insurance carrier could send customized letters to companies that move into new offices, suggesting a free consultation with an expert to discuss their needs.

• An IT firm might send a customer notices about the release of new applications or upgrades that match the owner’s business needs—or intelligence on the latest security threats and how to protect against them.

• Likewise, dentists can send automatic e-news reminders to make appointments.

Put yourself in your customer's shoes, use your imagination about what would make your customer smile, and, chances are, a good contact-management program can automate it for you.