Weird features in your CRM?

[Alex Snyder]

Got any strange features in your CRM or ILM? Something that's in there that just doesn't make any sense. Thread inspired by Matt Watson.

If I recall correctly (going back a while) both Autobase and ADP CRM made you enter the advertising source twice when entering a new customer. I think it was setup that way so you could say something like it was a walk-in from Cars.com, but you also entered the type of customer too (walk-in, phone-up, Internet, etc).

 

[mattwatson81]

When configuring automated process events, the ability to send someone an email instead of mailing them a letter if they have an email address in the system.

 

[mattwatson81]

A credit application kiosk is an interesting and odd one that I have seen. An interface for a customer in the showroom to input their personal credit information to be input in to the CRM.

 

[bpreston]

1 thing I hate about iMagic is that if you schedule an appointment it stays on the appointment board on the dashboard for eternity. So if you reschedule that appointment to another day or later that day, it's still there there are just two appointments with that customer.

Also, if you accidentally make a meeting appointment instead make a phone call appointment, that as well can't be removed from the appointment board.

Because of all of those glitches, my managers never look at the appointment board because there is all that nonsense going on.

Anyone else experience that?

 

[Alex Snyder]

Anyone else experience that?

The appointment changing is something they are currently working on. That is a peeve of ours too. We don't have the accidental meeting note issue at all (which isn't a glitch by the way - that's an accident) and I think that is because we push salespeople to only make meeting notes through the road to the sale and phone calls using the Click to Call.

Making a meeting note instead of a phone call is one hell of an accident by the way. If your salespeople are constantly doing that, they've got some serious issues. Think about it....they're two totally separate buttons to get to the phone call screen and the note screen. If they click Note, then they're only two options are General Note and Meeting Note (general note should be the default) and they have to consciously click on Meeting note (2 different clicks). On top of that, the phone screen looks absolutely nothing like the meeting note screen.

Tell me what they're doing and maybe I'll be able to tell you how to stop that.

I aim for a 90/10 conversion with vendors. When we get to a point where the issues are 90% training and 10% glitches, I'm a happy man!

 

[bpreston]

They do all their phone calls using click to call, however whenever they schedule a 2nd or 3rd phone call in a particular day we typically use the phone calls appointment, however the appointment tab defaults type to meeting appointment. So given the number of calls in a given day, someone is going to make an accident sooner or later. I've even done it on occasion. It's not something that is frequent, but it's annoying enough to be talking about it.

The more frequent occurrence is rescheduling and cancellations that stay on the appointment board.

 

[Alex Snyder]

You should use the Action Plans to schedule calls. Making phone appointments is only as good as the user. Through the action plans you can monitor and enforce on a global level.