If you have been struggling in the move from the office to remote work, our Managing Director, Account Director and Technical Solutions Architect talk about how they use CRM to support themselves while they carry out their jobs while working from home. Hopefully, you’ll pick up some tips and tricks that can help you as well.
Paul Pitman – Managing Director:
You won’t be surprised that for most of my working life Maximizer has been an essential part of what I do. Since moving to working from home and dealing with the COVID-19 disruption, my usage has changed.
In the past, I relied on Maximizer to provide insight into our pipeline of business and information on the flow of projects and customer service cases. Now it has become my essential communications hub. Whether it is checking in with colleagues, or liaising with clients and suppliers, Maximizer is my ever-ready personal telephone directory.
I am working with Maximizer on my laptop and my mobile phone. I can quickly review notes and document on the big screen, and then use Maximizer on my phone to dial the person.
Other features that have proven more useful than I thought. The amazing “Quick Search” feature that lets me look up by phone number any missed callers.
Finally, the notes and documents are helping with keeping on top of everything that is going on. It has made me appreciate how much of my personal management style was “managing by walking around.” Now that I cannot walk over and ask a colleague for information, Maximizer gives me a real-time update on what they are doing, and who they are helping.
Alan Joenn – Account Director:
I’ve worked from home successfully for many years. Much of this has been done at 300 miles distance from my colleagues, meaning that face-to-face contact is infrequent at best. I say ‘successfully’ because you really can’t hold onto your job working from home in sales without being successful. So, I must have been doing something right!
Working from home has only been possible for me because we have an operational CRM system. Enquiries and live chat coming into our central location can be recorded in CRM and a ‘follow up’ task allocated to me. I get this task in real-time, with no delay. I can call the new enquirer straight after the email arrived and the record being created in CRM. Similarly, I can check in real-time what conversations my colleagues have had with customers before making account management calls. This eliminates the time it takes to phone or email colleagues for updates and having to wait for their responses.
I list this real-time connection and engagement as my top take-away from our CRM system, but the system also provides huge efficiency benefits as well. I do not have to complete territory plans because everyone can see my whereabouts in the CRM calendar. I don’t have to send visit reports as my meeting notes are visible in CRM, stored against the relevant account, contact and opportunity. And I don’t have to complete a monthly forecast or pipeline report, as all my sales opportunities are up to date in CRM ready for scrutiny and aggregation into the company forecast. Effective CRM has made it possible for me to work remotely and continue to be successful.
Scott Nicol – Technical Solutions Architect:
In this different working environment, managing customer service enquiries through CRM really has not changed all that much at Collier Pickard – which is a good thing! We are still able to review digital enquiries and get them logged in a timely manner and investigate issues using replica customer environments – using the same methods as we normally do. Which really shows off one of the big benefits of a cloud or web-based CRM system – it doesn’t matter where you are, you can always be connected to your colleagues and your customers at the click of a mouse or tap of a smartphone.
Reviewing lists of open tickets is easy, as is checking the last update you sent to a customer. Helping colleagues out by reviewing their investigation notes or taking control of more complicated issues using escalation processes. Plus, it is a great feeling to be at the top of the “Most cases closed” dashboard! So, in summary – CRM has empowered us to continue to deliver the high-quality service our clients associate us – even in times such as this – without the need for additional training or testing new processes.
If you want to find out more about CRM and how it can help your business grow in 2020, we have a series of eBooks that you can access here. Alternatively, feel free to get in touch with one of our consultants and we will help you in any way that we can.
