Replacing The Excel CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

The question seems obscure? Maybe but the truth is that there are many companies relying on simple Excel sheets when it comes to customer relationship management. While Excel is a great tool for many calculation based tasks it is simply not the right one to use it everywhere. Simply because many people don’t know that there are many affordable solutions that perfectly meet their needs.

This is a quiet dangerous approach when it comes to the management of your company’s data. Is Excel really the right program to manage your customers? Think about the problems that arise when you want to work out of office? You can of course take a copy of the sheet with you and make your changes to it (but only if you knew before that you will need it). While this can be handled quiet easily if you are the only one working with the data it gets complicated when two or more people want to merge their data after editing.

Now let us have look at the major improvements that CRM software will bring to our everyday workflow. With a CRM it is possible to make assignments between appointments and contacts. This way you get a journal that can be looked up by co-workers. Now everyone can check what has been done with a customer before. Since professional CRM applications are network enabled and can handle multiple users, it is possible to manage user restrictions as well. Not everyone needs to have access to your VIP customers.

These are only some benefits you gain by using a CRM that is network enabled. Working in such an environment is totally different from the boring and endless lists of data that get more and more complicated to handle the longer they are. Modern software really energizes your business. All important information becomes visible with a mouse click or some keystrokes. Communication needs to be easy – otherwise it simply won’t take place. You can’t overestimate the power of regularly sent out personalized emails. From a CRM this happens with a few clicks.

So why do we need to think about all this? Isn’t everyone using such profitable software? No – even nowadays most small to medium size companies rely on the usage of standard tools like Excel. And this is mainly because people do not know that there are solutions that offer an easy user interface and can be installed for networked, multiuser work by an average PC user.

Gerard Schwabe is senior project manager at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of team management software Pimero.

categories: business optimization,rise production,enhance business,collaboration,CRM,organizing,self improvement