How Can Online CRM Help Your Company To Communicate Better?

Given that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, you clearly need to take good care of your client base. Yet sales, customer service and finance functions within a company fail to join up, and this can be bad for business. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer relationships, and installing a CRM provides a simple means of sharing relevant information about your customers that will help your employees to do their job better. 

Let’s take three hypothetical situations to demonstrate my point:

• A salesman is chasing a customer for a new order, but is unaware that the customer has unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days overdue .

• An engineer arrives on site to perform an installation, but has no knowledge of discussions between the customer and his salesperson on the detail of the work to be carried out so the work is completed incorrectly.

• An accounts administrator is chasing for payment of an invoice that has been issued, but is not aware that the contract has not been able to be completed because the goods are being returned as faulty.

In each case these people may have acted differently if customer communications had been joined up using a CRM system. The salesperson may have insisted on cash in advance;  the engineer wouldn’t have had to revisit an installation, and the accounts administrator may not have lost a customer for appearing incompetent.

What Else Does A CRM Do?

Of course there is a lot more to a CRM than providing a central point of reference for customer communications for everyone in your company. A CRM can join up your entire business process including:

• Gathering web  and social marketing leads directly into your sales process.
• Generating documentation for quotations, orders, invoices and customer service.
• Producing business pipeline reports  to assist in business planning.
• Analysing the relative profitability of all of your products / business .
• Measuring the performance of your sales staff.
• Evaluating the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

You can of course do all of this by extracting information from multiple sources and crunching numbers through a spreadsheet, but at a far greater cost over time. It is the integration and automation of your entire business process that is the true prize of a successful CRM deployment.

Web Security – How Do You Know If A Site Is Safe?

The Internet can be a dangerous place! We all love to scour the Internet for a bargain, but beware the bad stuff out there that can steal your credit card details, Paypal login, or turn your PC into a “zombie” that can be used by spammers and password thieves. Web sites that have been hacked and are being used to disseminate malicious software don’t advertise the fact .. in fact the web site owner probably won’t even know about it.

How Big A problem Is Web Security?

If you visit a compromised web site and your PC is missing the latest updates, you stand a good chance of ending up with software on your PC that you didn’t ask for. The problem is that it isn’t going to introduce itself and shake your hand! A bit like the neighbour you didn’t invite to your barbecue, it came along uninvited and it’s going to make a nuisance of itself.

How Do I Know If My PC Is Infected?

You are unlikely to recognise that your PC has been infected straight away. Internet malware can sit there silently waiting for you to connect to your online bank account so that it can steal your login details or send out so much traffic that it clogs up your entire network as we saw with one of our customers recently. Eventually though your PC will become unusable as more malware gets downloaded at which point you need to call your IT support company.

Which Are The Most Dangerous Web Sites

It's not just “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”  web sites that are potentially dangerous. According to a Symantec study in 2012, 61% of malicious web sites are regular web sites that have been compromised and infected with malicious code.

The Top 5 Most Exploited Web Site Categories - % Of Total Number Of Infected Websites

1.       Blogs / Web Communications - 19.8%

2.       Hosting / Personal Hosted Sites – 15.6%

3.       Business / Economy – 10%

4.       Shopping – 7.7%

5.       Education / Reference – 6.9%

Whilst these figures are based on 2011 data, the percentages won’t have changed much, and new around 9,500 malicious web sites are being found by Google every day.

How To Protect Your Computers Against Internet Malware

Home users need to make sure that their security is kept up-to-date. Make sure that you enable automatic updates for Windows Updates and keep applications such as Java and Adobe Acrobat updated as well. Malware exploits bugs in software that is installed on your PC to upload malicious code to your system, and regular updates are your best defence. There is no  need to shell out large amounts of money for security software though. Microsoft Security Essentials is free and good enough for home use. 

If you are a business, the same principles apply, but you need to take your IT security a little more seriously:

• Make sure that all Windows / Java / Adobe updates are applied to your computers on a weekly basis.
• Make sure you run commercial security software.
• Monitor your PC’s for tell-tale signs of trouble.
• Use web security software to block access to known infected sites as well as pornographic / illegal / non-business material

A little common sense also goes a long way. If you are asked to click on a link in an email, or a Facebook / Twitter post, engage brain before clicking. Is the person that it came from likely to have sent you a link to ”Some hilarious pics of you”? If in doubt, don’t click! 

Online CRM Part 4 - Managing your sales opportunities with Workbooks Online

Are you finding it difficult to manage your sales process using Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? It’s not that you can’t use these standard tools to organise your sales process, there are just better tools available. If your time is precious to you, then you can work more productively and make life easier for yourself by installing a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM ) system such as Workbooks Online.

CRM Essentials

For me, there are a number of essential activities that I need to be made as simple as possible:

Company / Contact Search

Any CRM system that doesn’t allow you to find the company or person quickly wouldn’t even make it off the starting blocks. Workbooks provides a search box that allows you to perform a “Google-like” search for whatever it is you are looking for. You are presented with a list of matching search results and you simply click on the right one to go to the record you need.

Recording Notes and Activities
Excel Spreadsheets and Outlook fall short for contact management because they don’t provide a simple-to-use way of recording telephone call and meeting notes. Knowledge is power and your staff will be better informed and provide a better service to your clients and customers if they have access to meeting and conversation notes when talking to your customers. Workbooks allows you to record details of every interaction that your employees have with your clients / customers and make them available to everybody.

Activity Scheduling
A CRM needs to help you to plan your time by allowing you to schedule tasks telephone calls and meetings with your existing and prospective customers and provide you with reminders for these activities. With Workbooks, you can schedule events together with notes to remind you of the purpose of the call / meeting etc. You will be presented with a schedule of reminders of your pending tasks when you log into Workbooks.

Quoting
Whilst you can use Excel / Word Templates to generate quotes, by storing your product / service book within the system, Workbooks simplifies the process of drawing up quotations by eliminating the need to search for product information in separate databases / spreadsheets and pre-populating the quote with the right contact information.

Pipeline Management
Pipeline Management is a critical activity for any business, but without an effective CRM tool, they can take a long time to produce manually. Workbooks automatically provides sales people, managers and business owners with complete visibility of all business opportunities as well as where they are in the deal process.

The video below provides you with a quick overview of how you can use Workbooks CRM to manage your customer / client data:

If your current customer management tools no longer meet your needs, then let us know. We would love to be able to help you to implement the right tools to help you grow your business.

Online CRM Part 2 - Turning Leads Into Profits More Efficiently

Sales people are hungry for success, not paperwork! They want to turn sales enquiries into orders with the minimum of effort. By automating your business processes using Workbooks.com’s online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, you can maximise the amount of time that your sales staff have to devote to serving your customers, helping them to work as efficiently as possible.

Before and After Workbooks.com!

Let me give you an example of how Workbooks Online CRM changed the way that Clearview Data Systems works. Before switching to Workbooks.com, we used Act! For Windows as a sales contact management system alongside a "home grown" order processing system. Customer support was a fairly manual affair which used Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to store customer emails and licence keys. There was no integration between any of these systems or with our web site, so web leads arrived via email and needed to be re-keyed into the system. As there was no integration with our order processing system, quotes were individually created as Excel spreadsheets by poring through our supplier price lists for current pricing and manually entering this information into the spreadsheet.

How Workbooks.com Has Made Us More Efficient

Today things work very differently. Web leads no longer need to be entered manually since they are captured directly into our Workbooks system from our web forms. There is no need to search for product pricing and descriptions since our product book is integrated into Workbooks for sales and order processing. We can also see details of all of our customer’s equipment that we are supporting as well as any contact that our engineers have had with our customers by way of support. In addition, Workbooks can automatically produce all of the sales pipeline reports that we need to monitor and predict revenue streams as well as plan expenditure and resourcing requirements.

You can see an overview of how you would manage your sales process using Workbooks.com in the video below:

Workbooks.com has cut out a huge amount of inefficiency in the way that our sales process works. Do you feel that your sales processes could be improved but don't know who to turn to for advice? If so, let me know what the issue is that you need to address and I would be happy to let you know if we can help.

Please come back next week when you will learn more about how Workbooks can help you to automate further areas of your company operations.

Five Ways That Cloud Storage and Collaboration Is Good For Business.

Wouldn’t it make life so much easier for your business if your staff could use the cloud to collaborate on project documents within their teams as well as with business partners and clients? What about using the cloud to back up information on your company laptops and tablet computers so that you never need to worry about loss of data due to a hard disk failure or malware attack again? But can you trust public cloud services with your company data?

In truth, unless you need to store highly confidential or personal information, it's not difficult to set up secure online data storage for your employees as and when you need it. Where confidential information needs to be stored online, low cost encryption software can be used to secure files that you upload to protect information from prying eyes in the unlikely event that your account is compromised.

Today’s online storage and data sharing services also make it extremely easy for your employees, partners and customers to share files online. The reputation of organisations such as Google, Trend Micro and Accellion stands or falls on their ability to protect your data, so as you would expect they have made a significant investment in both technology and specialist staff to ensure that every reasonable precaution is taken to protect your confidential information.

Cloud based data sharing between project teams helps to increase the productivity of your staff. New versions of documents generated as part of a project are automatically updated on all relevant devices using data synchronisation. This significantly improves collaboration between distributed teams since everyone can be sure that they always have the latest copies of project documentation and drawings to hand. 

Setting up data synchronisation between your PC and the cloud is a simple operation. You simply download the software which sets up a synchronisation folder on your PC / device. You can create subfolders which will allow you to group items together (e.g. for different projects), and from then on the whole process of synchronising changes to the cloud and your other devices (e.g. your iPad) can be automated. The automatic synchronisation process runs silently in the background and requires no investment in hardware or training.

How safe is my data?

Cloud based storage encrypts all files stored in the cloud in secure data centres. Backup routines will also be used to ensure that your data is safe in the event of equipment failure and can be recovered quickly in the event of a technical or human error. The weakest link in the security chain is therefore the password that you use to access your account. To address this threat, two factor authentication can be used in conjunction with services such as Google Apps for Business.

Five key benefits of cloud data storage:

1. Simple File Sharing: Online file sharing services allow you to access your files from any device. For example, you may create a document on a work PC, but may also need to access it from home PC or on your iPad / Android tablet when you are on a client’s premises. With a few clicks you can also share any of your files with your clients.
2. Access anywhere: Your data is always accessible to authorised users at any time and via any internet connected device (including smartphones and tablets).
3. Safe storage: Data is automatically backed up to secure online storage. Robust security is provided to secure your confidential data, including encrypted transmission and malware scanning.
4. Synchronisation of all devices: As you update your information, it is automatically synchronised across all authorised devices, including PC and MAC clients as well as IOS and Android tablets and smartphones.
5. Efficient management: It is simple to create new user accounts from a central management console. In addition, you can allow users to create their own personal areas to manage their data.

For startup and small companies, it is entirely possible to use cloud storage instead of incurring the expense of installing your own file server. It allows you to store, synchronise, and secure your files online in a single location and share these files with colleagues and business partners at the click of a mouse button.

If you would like to know whether online collaboration services such as Trend Micro SafeSync for Business or Google Apps for Business would meet your needs for online data storage and collaboration, please call us on 01707 255060, or email us at info@clearview.co.uk.