We are pleased to take former Salesforce user Rubicon Workflow Solutions on board with OpenCRM. Rubicon is a company dedicated to supporting creative professionals working on a digital platform. This is an exciting CRM project which we are glad to be involved with.
http://www.rubicon-solutions.co.uk
Nationwide is the UK’s largest vehicle body repairer, and we are proud to announce their decision to work with us at OpenCRM for their hosted CRM requirements. Of course a business such as Nationwide is as much about caring for the customer as anything else and so it makes sense to have a solid CRM solution in place.
A real benefit a CRM solution can bring to your organisation is one of information consistency.
Moving away from disparate siloed solutions and folders containing spreadsheets and data lists dotted all over on different machines means this data remains constant, with the added advantage of being able to track any alterations that are made.
Data conformity in CRM stems from the fact that everyone in your organisation is working on the same page. Instead of individuals or departments having their own copies of customer records, everyone remotely accesses and uses the same record. This means that as soon as one of your company clients changes their phone number for example, this alteration is apparent across the board instead of on the one person’s machine.
This centralised database of records promotes data consistency and reduces the margin of error.
A further benefit of using hosted CRM for your data storage concerns record of ownership. This means when viewing data, you can also see to whom the information is assigned, and who has been responsible for any amendments to the record. A principle beneficiary of this is the Helpdesk team. Being able to see the “assigned to” operator provides a Helpdesk ticket with an anchor point, should anyone else take a call from the same customer they are able to refer you back to the original technician or to view any notes made by that person.
This potentially cuts out any unnecessary and potentially unprofessional follow-up calls for a case that has already been dealt with.
The transfer of ownership is also a simple and error-free process. Reassigning a record keeps information intact, whilst notifying the new owner of the record in question. So if a particular issue needs to be transferred to another operator in your system there will be no loss of information, with the audit function offering the necessary mechanism for internal control.
In other formats, information passed around the office and beyond will gradually alter in shape and message as it goes from one desk to the next. However, information that is shared within a cloud-based CRM solution either remains unchanged or has all alterations accounted for. Your data is visible across the board and is accessible from anywhere, in the office, in a meeting or out in the field.
Sales Pitch: For more information on how OpenCRM can help with your data and contact management please click on this link
Something we believe in here at OpenCRM is transparency. We are confident that our product will work for you and we have great long-term relationships with our customers. A part of this confidence in our product is that we offer a monthly subscription rate. This gives our customers the chance to split payments for their hosted CRM solution over the course of the year making it an affordable and easily managed overhead. A recent study showed that two-thirds of Salesforce customers are billed annually*, making this a harder pill to swallow in today’s market place where the landscape changes more frequently than ever before.
As well as making the financing of OpenCRM more manageable, this helps keep the relationship with our customers active, as we interact on a far more frequent basis than simply an annual subscription renewal. We work in close partnership with our clients, meaning that when you sign up with OpenCRM you are more than “just a number”, having a dedicated team working for and with you. We like getting to know our customers and us knowing their CRM needs puts us all on the same page and sets the foundations for a happy and fruitful working relationship.
*source: Zdnet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/salesforce-competition-distractions-to-hamper-growth/65230
Focussing on medical education services, we are pleased to announce that Pharma Mix have adopted OpenCRM as for their hosted CRM needs after having vetted a number of different solutions. Pharma Mix is a technology and services company specializing in knowledge and effectiveness solutions for the healthcare industry.
My Business FD are a UK based company that provide Finance Directors to help secure funding for businesses of all sizes. The team works with their clients to help build a business plan, provide a financial forecast and assist in funding applications. We are happy to announce that for their CRM requirements, My Business FD are now using OpenCRM, and we look forward to a bright sunny future together.
OpenCRM is being used by a huge variety of companies, each of which has their own individual needs and demands of the system. One way in which we are able to service these differences is by enabling the creation of custom fields. This allows you to capture all kinds of unique data within your CRM solution.
Furthermore there are many distinct types of user-defined fields you can create. As well as text fields, some of the more common ones we use all the time on clients’ systems include creating picklists, checkboxes, URL, telephone and user selector fields. As well as broadening the functionality, this makes creating new records quicker and reduces the margins of error – selecting a value from a picklist means they will always be consistent rather than having to type the entry every time.
To give you an example you could create the following field on a company record entitled “Catchment Area”. This might be a picklist populated with the values South-East, South-West, North-East, North-West, Midlands and London.
Once you have created the ability to capture this unique information, the next logical step is to make this data quickly and easily available for you. Having a way of displaying all the companies in a particular catchment area means you are able to use this list, perhaps to send out a targeted message relevant to this group of companies, or you can work your way through the list in a systematic and logical way. This is easily done in OpenCRM by creating a view which displays companies based on the selected filter.
This is just one example of how creating custom fields gives you a great way of distilling your data – by using combinations of fields, custom fields and views, you can clarify the data in as specific or general as your needs demand.
For further information on how you can create custom fields in OpenCRM please refer to this FAQ.
Year in year out, this is the period in the calendar when people throw themselves head first into those New Year’s resolutions. They come in many shapes and forms but often fall into common categories – healthy diet, active living, a more positive approach to family and working life. More often than not it will be these same resolutions that were made the year before, and they are the resolutions that tend to fall by the wayside come this time next month.
If you need that kick in the rear every now and then to remind you to take advantage of your expensive gym membership, or your determination to not forget family birthdays, then OpenCRM may be one way of helping you out. Just as you can set yourself reminders that let you know when your meetings and activities are due you can also set up those digital memos to appear and jog (sorry bad joke) your memory as to just how much the gym subscription cost you, or that your brother-in-law’s birthday is just round the corner.
Of course, whether you pay attention to these notifications is entirely up to you – your hosted CRM solution can remind and TELL you to get down to the gym – sadly it won’t do the workout for you! (not in version 3 anyway :-)
Why not let OpenCRM help you with management of your time, your appointments and your other calendar entries? Furthermore entries that you have put into your Google calendar can be quickly and easily synchronised into OpenCRM with the tools we have available making them easily available on the road (or rowing machine) on your mobile devices.
If time is money, then it stands to reason that you should be able to track your use of time - just as you need to view your bank statement to keep tabs on your finances. A CRM solution offers a number of services in time tracking and time management.
As well as the Calendar module which gives you an overview of your time management, you can view your time spent on all manner of projects and activities. Just as you plan a budget for an event, you can also plan a time schedule, and at the end of the event you can review this data to see if your time management is accurate. This brings us back into your finance management, as it lets you see if you have undersold your time for example.
A recent piece of development here at OpenCRM is the addition of an Active Period on the Opportunities module. This is a field which shows you how long an Opportunity has been opened. This function allows you to create views and reports for yourself and your organisation to show a set of Opportunities that have been open beyond a specific period of time, for example 14 days. This is a quick way of reviewing all Opportunities that are due for a follow-up, or those which might need a final review.
As with other functions such as setting reminders, or follow-up activities, this is another example of how OpenCRM can help you organise your time management and ensure that opportunities, tasks and calls are not missed. Good use of a hosted CRM solution is the perfect way of making the time you have in the bank work for you and your business.
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