As organizations start to really use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to manage their customer data, the one commodity that we all seem to have far more of than yesterday is data. We have more data residing in our customer databases than ever before and the quantity of that data is rapidly expanding on a daily basis.
And worse yet, that data tends to get stale very quickly. The information that was very important last Friday is now replaced by a new combination of factors that is much more important and relevant today.
All of this makes it difficult to manage our business. We really don’t have time to plow through reports and compare this weeks report with the one that was printed last week.
Enter Dashboards and Exception Reporting
1- Management by Exception
Frequently there is no good way to manually search for errors that may have occurred during the course of daily business. A good solution however is to some way to notify you that some data is missing or may be incorrect.
A good exception management system should be looking at your database and locating those situations that that will cause you problems sometime in the future. Depending on what process you use, you could be sent an e-mail or text message letting you know that something needs your attention. An alternative would to create a way to quickly collect and review those database records in error. For example, in ACT! you could use Groups to sweep up contact records needing attention.
2- Business Alerting
Normal business alerts are similar to exception reporting but in this case we want to make sure nothing “drops between the cracks”. A missed appointment because we forgot to look at the calendar this morning. Forgetting to follow-up with a customer whose contract is about expire because we were out of town or on vacation. Or perhaps finding out that your leads have dropped off drastically this month and your sales reps have little in their pipeline.
Building an ‘alerting’ process into your CRM system will help keep you on top of the important things happening in your customer database. Reading what happened last month is not nearly as good as finding out early about problems that could have been addressed at the time. Using a product like KnowledgeSync from Vineyardsoft will deliver close to real-time business activity alerting. KnowledgeSync works with most all CRM software systems.
3- Dashboards
Compressing a great deal of data into manageable, actionable information is the goal of using dashboards. Being able to view comparative data in a graphical format makes it easy to spot trends, measure performance and stay on top of your business.
A typical ACT! sales dashboard will show:
Activity Levels by Rep
Pipeline by Sales Stage
Closed (Won/Lost) Deals
Top Sales Opportunities.
Other dashboards can be created to look at 30-60-90 day comparisons of potential sales, activity history and call-backs.
Dashboards are one of the vastly underused tools in our business planning and management. Once you start using them to monitor the health of your business you will never go back to printed reports.
The items above are not anything new. They are things that we should be doing to help manage our business world. Used properly, they will save you time and prevent those “why did this happen?” moments.
{ 1 trackback }