By Victoria Dyke on Mon 20 October 2014 in CRM
On average 60% of an employee’s time at work is spent on non-profit making activities. These activities are usually made up of time consuming admin that you can probably lessen by making a few simple changes. Read on to see my top 5 time saving changes you could make today.
1. Finding general contact information:
Searching emails or Googleing for up to date company details is inefficient and is not future proof. Consider providing your staff with a database of valuable contact information that is accessible by all departments and kept up to date via your most important store of contact details – your accounts system. This way all departments can work from the same data and provide an effective service to your customers.
2. Creating customer lists:
Many of us will let out a big sigh when it comes to creating a list of customers defined by strict criteria. It can take hours to gather the important information from multiple sources and then exclude unsubscribes, preferences etc. The answer is to maintain all your customer and business information in one place so you have access to a single source of data, meaning this task would take minutes not hours.
3. Identifying key opportunities:
If you are currently emailing your sales team their leads, then you are likely to miss a fair few amongst many other emails in a busy inbox. Help your sales team identify worthwhile opportunities by logging them in a central place with qualification statuses. This will ensure leads are pro-actively followed up and not lost amongst emails.
4. Accessing critical customer information:
Customer knowledge can help in upselling, targeting or in providing effective customer service. But accessing this knowledge can be challenging. For example, finding out customer specific pricing, what they’ve purchased in the last year or what they frequently buy could take weeks, especially if you’re asking the accounts team at the end of a month. Have you considered how you could provide other departments access to this data without interrupting your accounts team through an integrated database?
5. Processing orders:
Manually re-keying orders is error prone and time consuming and, if orders are incorrectly shipped, can damage relationships. Directly confirming orders into your accounts system is not only quicker, but more accurate.
By consolidating your core business and customer information, you would give your employees access to valuable information and reduce the time they spend on administrative tasks.
Think about it… how much time would you save if 80% of your orders arrived into your accounts system without any staff interaction? With this time, how much more relationship building or prospecting could you do?
ProspectSoft CRM and eCommerce integrates with Access Dimensions, Exchequer, Pegasus Opera and Sage 50 accounting systems; bringing valuable customer and business information into one single view and help you run your processes more efficiently.