When you use something on a daily basis, it quickly becomes a part of your routine. This might be the route you choose to drive to work, how you make a cup of coffee in the morning, or some of the ways you approach your work, or in our case, your CRM solution. Sometimes it takes a bit of observation and input from someone else to suggest improvements to your routine. Of course your first reaction will probably be to defend your way of doing things, after all this is how you have always done things – no-one likes change for the sake of it!

Once your pride has been swallowed however, you’ll see how filtering the water does makes your coffee taste so much better, or how that short scenic route to the office really does make the day start on a more pleasant note. I was happy enough with the way I searched for information in OpenCRM, clicking back and forth between modules in one window, when a colleague smiled and pointed at the magnifying glass beside the contact name. Clicking here opened the record in a new window, meaning I no longer had to click back and forth. Of course the magnifying glass had not appeared out of nowhere, it had been there all along. But having slipped into a routine I limited myself to see the tools I used every day and blended the rest out.

Every now and again some collaboration, advice and shared information will provide either new food for thought, or possibly a great new angle on how to approach certain tasks.

Sales Pitch: For advice on using OpenCRM whether a general overview or for a specific part of a particular module, our Knowledgebase is a great starting point. If the topic you are searching on is not covered in there, please contact us and we will do our best to remedy this.

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

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.

I have just read an article by Mike Gerholdt who authors a blog called ‘Button Click Admin’ which is in itself a good balanced read.

I particularly like Mike’s strap line “for those of us stuck between the Uber Coders & User who cant log in”. I guess that gives the essence of what Mike does and his blog is a valuable insight (ButtonClickAdmin.com).

The article he posted which caught my eye was about Project Management skills and how you could learn a lot from very popular US Chef Robert Irvine (Restaurant Impossible).

His assertion, which I fully agree with, was that there are some key attributes of successful people and regardless of which walk of life they have accomplished great things, the mechanisms that they use are quite often transferable.

Eyes Wide Open

Keeping your eyes wide open both literally and metaphorically is a good stance to take with any project. Equally I would add is the need to keep your EARS wide open also. The key here is to ditch your preconceptions and work with what you can actually see.

Clear Goals

I guess we all know this to be true, set clear goals and make your expectations and objectives know. This includes being very clear of the touch points and how we will gauge progress and success.

High Expectations

This is something that is very close to my heart, expect the very best from the people you work with, this is both respectful and allows your colleagues to shine. It is something we try and instill here at OpenCRM on a daily basis. At the core of this belief is that by giving people this level of respect, allowing them to be very honest with you, everyone cuts to the chase and when appropriate people can always be honest with you in return.

Make the tough decisions that no one else will

Again something close to my heart. Indecision is the killer of any project. Being able to make the difficult decisions or at the least floating the opinion to broach subjects that others might find taboo is what makes a great project leader. The important thing is to get the project moving again.

Everybody STOP!

This is a great tool to have in your armoury, just get everyone to stop and assess where the project is. As Mike observes, “When was the last time that you got everyone to stop” and I have to admit – agreed – not something you might do on an ad hoc basis and probably one of the most powerful review tools available to us.

Mike seems like a good guy, it’s a shame he is an avid salesforce.com admin but I can’t hold that against him (honest!) as I respect the tone and content of his comments. We deal with large numbers of Projects that all need Managing and these pointers can form a valuable part of the fabric of what we do.

You may have noticed that we don't have a Remember Me option on our login page. This is because it is not good practice to save login details for systems that contain sensitive data.

If this option were configured, people who have access to your computer could access your protected systems without any user control, they could impersonate you and potentially cause havoc in your name.

Even though we do not have this Remember Me option your internet browser does have technology built in that will prompt you to save your username and password when you enter login details. We strongly advise that you do not use this feature, should your computer fall into the wrong hands your access to OpenCRM will not be compromised!

From OpenCRM V3.02 this browser save feature is disabled by default and although not every browser implements the standards that we adhere to major browsers will no longer ask if you want to remember the username/password for this page.