Stay in the Loop

11 Feb 2014

Yesterday was one of those days for me. You know the ones, where you might as well be inside a pinball machine, bouncing around, someone or something always needing your attention. On days like that, it’s so easy to forget to do something or miss a change in status of, for example, one of your tickets or sales orders. Even on those days, you still need to respond to this changes in good time and a CRM system can help.

There are a number of ways a CRM system can help to keep you informed and in the loop, here are some of the ways your OpenCRM system can help to keep you on track: 

Notify User
This is a feature that I use all of the time. When someone calls and I’m unable to put them through to the person they’re after, I just click the ‘Notify’ button on the relevant record, maybe a Sales Order or Project they’ve called about or just their contact record. Then I can easily select the person they were after, type up a quick message, and send it off. They receive it as an email with the message and a link to the record in question. I don’t forget to tell them and they see the message in the top of their inbox, so they can’t miss it.

Re-assignment/Conversion
When a record is assigned to a user, either through manual reassignment or when a Lead is converted, they will receive an email notifying them of the change with a link back to that record. Automation like this means that those records are less likely to fall through the cracks, because your users will be automatically alerted to their newest responsibility.

HelpDesk Tickets
When your support team are working flat out, it can be easy for them to lose track of one of their tickets. In order to stop this happening, OpenCRM will send them a notification if one of their tickets needs their attention. For example, they’ve sent an email in response to the ticket asking for a bit more information about the nature of the problem at hand. Your client emails back and the system automatically changes the ticket status to “Needs Action” and sends the assigned user an email letting them know that there has been a response. No chance of that ticket being overlooked now.

Sales Orders
When a sales order is eSigned, you want to make sure that all of your purchase ordering, invoicing, packaging, and dispatching kick into gear right away, making sure that no part of this process is missed or delayed. We’ve recently added the ability for you to not only have a notification sent to any of your users to alert them of the change in status, but also to include the PDF of the Sales Order itself. Think of it, not only is your dispatch team notified when an order is ready to be packed and sent, but now they can just open the PDF direct from the email. (If you don’t see these options in your Settings screen, drop your account manager a line to get your system scheduled for an upgrade.

Click-Throughs
When you send out a marketing email, you want to be able to track how people are responding right from the word go. Yes you can have a look over to the Campaign itself and see how your click-throug-rates are doing, but OpenCRM can do one better. Every time someone clicks a link in your email, you can set up OpenCRM to send you a notification so you can follow it up. It’s also a great way to start to get a feel for how your campaign is doing.

As you can see from this list, there are a number of ways OpenCRM can help keep you and your users in the loop. We hope that by introducing a few of these useful features to your daily routine, OpenCRM can help you to stay on top of all the important things that need your attention.