Filling in the Blanks
I’m sure it’s a frustration you have all experienced – when you are filling in a form and you wonder – why do I have to fill all this rubbish in, most of it isn’t even relevant to me! Halfway through you’re thinking you can’t be bothered to jump through the hoops, do you know what - in the bin it goes. It would be interesting to see some statistics to show how much time is wasted daily or weekly by filling in irrelevant questions on forms, whether online or on paper. Actually that figure wouldn’t be interesting, it would probably be depressing – so let’s move swiftly on!
Your business probably uses many different ways of capturing customer and potential client data. Some of these may come in from collected business cards, or completed webforms, or from in and outbound phone enquiries or emails. As well as having the information coming in via different channels you may have different types of enquiries coming in – specific product questions, partnership offers, corporate sponsorship questions, the list goes on.
A great way of capturing this variety of data in your OpenCRM is by using different layouts. Not surprisingly by layouts we mean the arrangement of the fields in a module. A telephone canvassing team calling people to carry out a survey will require a specific set of fields laid out in sequence, so they can work their way down the page as they are on the call. A team working on a different survey will need a completely different layout. A sales person may want to capture much simpler information, without needing to scroll through the other questions relevant to the canvassing team. Using a different layout for all of the above means each different type of user has a quick visibility of the data they need, saving time and reducing the chance of missing out any important details.
To summarise, this means not only do your CRM software users benefit from being able to enter data that they need quickly and easily into the system, but also the customer is not kept waiting, or bored, as you run through what they consider to be pointless and irrelevant. After all, in a system which is all about customer management, surely this is a huge, yet logical step in the right direction?!
