Everything about a customer, on one screen

A customer rings up. They want to know why their copy hasn't arrived, whether their colleague's digital access is still live, and could you send last year's invoice while you're at it. If the answer means opening three systems and a spreadsheet, the call takes twenty minutes and the customer can hear you typing.

Avio puts the whole picture on one screen. It's a publishing CRM built around subscriptions, so the record shows what a publisher needs: orders by product family, corporate links, consent by brand, notes by channel and the delivery history.

Find anyone, fast

Search is in the header on every screen, so you can look someone up mid-task without losing your place. When you need to be more precise, full search covers name, email, address, country, customer or address ID, campaign code, batch, agent and enterprise reference.

You can also choose what you're searching against: the billing address, the delivery address, or the contact on the order. That matters when an agent places an order on behalf of a reader, or a finance department pays for someone else's subscription.

The contact summary

Open a contact and you get the summary: contact and address details, then an order summary grouped by product family, then the full order history. Linked corporate subscriptions show alongside, so you can see straight away that this person reads under their employer's site licence. Organisation details (industry, company size and turnover band) are there too, which helps when you're selling into businesses.

People and addresses are separate records

This is one of those design decisions that sounds dull and saves endless trouble. In Avio, a person and an address are different records. Several people can share one address, and each record has its own status and demographics.

So when a business moves offices, you change one address and everyone there moves with it. When one reader leaves, the address stays good for everyone else. The contact screen tells you how many names sit at an address, and one click lists them all with quick actions to view, add notes, create an order or merge.

Consent you can prove

Marketing preferences are held per product family, with a dated history of every opt-in and opt-out. If someone asks when they agreed to hear from you, or a regulator does, you've got the answer with a date against it.

Status rules help too. Mark a contact as deceased, for example, and Avio opts them out everywhere automatically. Nobody has to remember to untick boxes on six brands. There's more on preferences and status rules on the data quality page.

Notes and history that build up over time

Notes are typed by communication channel and product, so over time each record builds a proper contact history: who called, about which title, and what was said. The next person to pick up the phone knows what happened last time.

Related records sit alongside: other people at the same address, anyone using the same email, merge history and missed copies. Print and digital gone-away flags are separate, because a reader whose magazine comes back can still be perfectly reachable by email.

How it fits with the rest

The customer record is where most work in Avio starts. From here you can take a new order, a trial or a controlled circulation request (orders and subscriptions), open the sales ledger (finance), or allocate the reader to a corporate licence. Everything you do is logged in the audit trail.

If you're an SME publisher who wants a CRM that also covers advertisers, prospects and your news sites, have a look at Adeptis instead. Not sure which fits? Our Avio or Adeptis page lays out the differences. Or book a demo and we'll walk through a customer record with you.

Questions

Next: Orders and subscriptions. Paid, trial, bundled and controlled circulation orders, in print and digital, from one order wizard.