Customer Relationship Management Introduction
A major priority for all companies is the successful generation and administration of sales leads and promotions. The CRM module within Access Accounts enables you to streamline these activities using a single, detailed database covering both Customers and Prospects.
Contents |
Pre-set up Considerations |
System Settings |
Security Profiles |
Speed up Data Entry |
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The CRM Control module enables you to build targeted telephone, mail and Email campaigns using a single database, covering both your Customers and your Prospects.
With the CRM module, it is easy to view the entire history of your contact with a Customer, including any quotes or trading history. You have total control over the information that is retained.
Field labels within the module can be personalised, allowing the use of terminology that is easily understood and specific to your company's needs.
Campaign data sets can be compiled using any search criteria, including lead source, status, territory, sales person and next action date.
Prospects can be selected for each campaign using any relevant data field, enabling you to search and compile lists based on criteria such as source of lead, status, sales person and next action date.
Significant data, such as sales person and source of lead, can be verified against a pop-up list of valid entries that you compile.
You can add multiple Contact names to each Prospect Company or Customer. This enables you to schedule sales activity with many different departments or individuals as you choose.
The CRM module enables you to manage the activities associated with Prospects such as your Salesmen's calls, and generating 'To Do' lists and personalised letters.
Each record within the CRM software includes space for up to eight pages of free-format notes and these can be date stamped every time you work with a Customer. You can also attach documents to any Customer Record.
Access CRM software gives your sales team the ideal environment in which to manage Customer-focused sales and marketing campaigns.
Turning Prospects into Customers
Prospects never appear in your Sales Ledger or financial reports, but estimates or Pro Formas can be raised from within the CRM module and can be based upon information in your Stock Control module. When a Prospect becomes a Customer, you can elevate their status with a click of a button and continue prospecting activity with them.
Web Enabled
Access Transaction Broker can automatically collect leads from your web site and bring them into the CRM module, instantly creating new Prospect Records. This removes the need for any re-keying of data, enabling you to eliminate errors, save time and reduce costs.
This topic pulls together items that you should consider when setting up your CRM module; a list of the system settings that are required and some ideas for speeding up the setup process.
Most of these items can be set up for the first time or changed after Prospect records have been entered, but you might find it simpler to consider them before you enter too much data.
Pre-set up Considerations
Who will be using the CRM module?
If you have staff who will only be working on obtaining leads, following up these leads and setting up Prospect records for your Sales staff to work with, then these staff can be given a very restricted user profile. They will not need access to any of the other modules within Access Accounts.
Perhaps more usual is that the staff working on getting and developing leads may at some time be required to make pipeline entries and so must have access to the Sales Order transactions for Estimate orders.
However your staff work, it is important that a suitable Security Profile is created for staff working in this area. There are certain areas of the CRM module itself that you might wish to restrict, such as the ability to edit the drop-down lists of values that are available for any classification category.
Prospect Record codes
You should work out in advance the best scheme for identifying your Customers and Prospects.
You do not have to follow the same scheme for Prospects and Customers as the code can be changed when the Prospect record is converted to a Customer record.
Meaningful codes will be much easier for your staff to remember. A simple scheme, such as the first 3 characters of the Prospect's name followed by 3 digits, has advantages when searching for records as the characters can be entered as search criteria to list all the records starting with those characters.
Automatic code numbers can be created, as for Customers. This option is found in the System Options for the Sales Ledger.
Assignment of Prospects
You may run a partnership network whereby you have a team that find and qualify prospective customers but then pass these leads to other companies to follow up.
If this is the case then you should consider how these partner companies will be identified in your records. See CRM System Options for more information.
They must be Customers within your accounts and they will support the Prospect as they become a Customer.
The Assigned to field, on a Prospect record, is used for this "pairing up" of your partners with prospective customers.
There is a system setting that enables you to define which of your Customers are also partners and eligible to have Prospects assigned to them.
Postcode management
Postcode management enables you to assign your Prospects to the Customer partners who will be looking after them, by area according to the postcode of the Prospect record.
To use the postcode management system, you must first decide how these partner companies will be identified in your records. This is described in CRM System Options.
Then you must set up a matrix of the partners and postcode areas. You can also elect to add products into this matrix so that different partners can be allocated the same postcode area but for different products.
Then, when a new prospect record is ready to be assigned to a partner, the prospect's postcode can be used to locate the most appropriate partner.
See Postcode Management.
Classification of a Prospect
To enable you to classify a Prospects quickly and consistently, the CRM module makes use of lookup fields.
These fields have a user-definable label and hold a user-definable list.
Once these labels and lists have been defined, all your staff have to do is to make a selection from the list.
Prospect records are then consistently classified by the selection of a set of values from these pre-defined lists.
These classification lists are sometimes referred to as Popup lists or Drop Down lists.
Before creating your Prospect records, you should decide:
How these classification fields are to be used;
Change the labels to make their use clear;
Enter the initial list of values;
Decide who will be able to amend these lists.
Explain to your staff the method of selection to be used when classifying Prospect records.
This process is described in the Help topic CRM Popup List Configuration.
AFD Postcode and Address management software
If you have AFD Postcode and Address management software installed, you can use it to locate the postal address of your Customer or Prospect when creating records. When the address is selected, it will be inserted into the new record automatically.
Please note that the postcode search facility only works with AFD software.
System Settings
System settings for the CRM module are found on the Options menu by selecting CRM Options.
It is here that you should enter your Task and Pipeline settings and select the Postcode Matrix options described above.
Task Types and Task Status
A Task Type can be anything that needs to be scheduled for action. You should create a list of task types, for example: Call, Email, Letter.
There will be an existing Task Type of Note. This is a system type that cannot be re-configured but can be made inactive.
When a task is added to a CRM record, a drop down list of the active task types will be available. These are labelled as Actions.
Just select the action for the task.
The Task Status list will contain three predefined items: Outstanding; In Progress and Complete.
These items cannot be amended or deleted but additional status definitions can be added.
Pipeline Probability and Pipeline Category
A pipeline record is a recorded estimate within the Sales Order processing module.
Pipeline values are an indication of the likely revenue from a particular prospect or campaign.
A pipeline probability is attached to the pipeline entry, this is an indication of the likelihood of the revenue being achieved. This can be amended as the pipeline value becomes more secure.
Pipeline categories are used to group pipeline entries and would usually be a list of the products for which you are prospecting. For example: Software; Hardware; Consultancy; Data transfer; 3rd Party.
You can set up as many pipeline categories as you need.
Postcode matrix tab
Postcode Management has been described above and enables you to assign your Prospects to the Customer partners, who will be looking after them, by area according to the postcode of the Prospect record. This tab holds the partner identified and your choice of postcode matrix.
Security Profile
It is important that a suitable Security Profile is created for staff working with the CRM module. Not only might you wish to restrict their access to other areas of the accounts but you might also want to restrict their access to functionality in certain areas of the CRM module itself.
Please review all the CRM Security Profile options carefully.
Security Profile
The CRM module has a separate set of security options
CRM User
A Security Profile called CRM User will be created automatically when the software is installed. This profile will have a set of options that will enable a User assigned to this profile to use the CRM module without being able to access any other part of the software.
This profile will have access to Sales Order transactions - Orders and Estimate, because this functionality is available from the CRM window.
Access to the CRM module can be granted to any of your existing security profiles if you prefer.
Access to the CRM module windows can be set to: Full access; View access or No Access.
Processing actions can be set to Enabled or Disabled.
To disable the ability of a User to change the configuration of the search tabs on the CRM Control window:
Select Security Profiles and locate the User's profile record.
Open the CRM menu by clicking on the CRM label. Open the Records menu and click on CRM Search.
Click Edit.
In the right-hand pane, click on the menu next to the Options label and select No Access. None will be displayed on the menu.
If you want to permit the User to view the options but not to change them, select View Access.
Click OK to save the changes.
When the User next logs in to Accounts, they will have no, or limited, access to the Options window.
Speed Up Data Entry
Using the Bulk Update feature
If you wish to make the same update to, or record the same information against, a number of your Prospects or Customers, this can be done using the Bulk Update feature.
Importing data
If you have existing Prospect or Contact data, you may be able to import it using the Access Import Utility or Transaction Broker.
To use the Access Import Utility, data fields from an existing database have to be re-arranged within a spreadsheet into the pre-determined sequence of fields which is required by the CRM module. Then the fields can be imported as text files using the utility.
Records can also be created using Transaction Broker to map fields in an existing database or spreadsheet to the fields in the CRM module.
You will still have to visit each record to clean up the data and apply the correct classifications, but importing will enable you to get the basic record created with address and contact details.