First question, not a data or technical question but one of daily business operations: Does your business deal with consumers directly or with businesses?

If your answer is CONSUMERS, then you will likely manage your customer data in a contact centric manner. Meaning that you will be specifically interested in grouping your information, intelligence, documentation, and other items around the person or contact. There is no real, “commercial entity” in the picture – or not that plays into any decision or action. Sure, you may have information about where the client works or what business a client owns, but in your business the business of the client doesn’t become a factor.

If your answer is “I deal with people AT COMPANIES….” then you should manage your data in an account centric fashion.  Let me explain.  Managing data in an account centric manner means that the top layer of the data model is a Company or Account name.  Of course, we deal with people so we need contact records.  In fact the bulk of our information from a relationship perspective really centers around the people at the company.  So, we need detailed abilities to “know” our customer, that person we talk with, in addition to the knowledge of the company as a whole entity.  To reiterate, account centric says the top level of the entity we deal with is the company.   Think a bit like this – “If Mr. Joe Customer changes employment from company A to company B, do I lose the entire business relationship at Company A?”  If the answer is yes then you are NOT an account centric business.  If the answer is no, then you are likely an account centric business.  Obviously, if your answer is not clear, then you might want to investigate your ties to Joe and potentially others.  Certainly Joe can be key but if you are account centric it is imperative that your team know the account as well as Joe.

Now, we must consider if the software you are using or planning to use will allow account, contact or both centricities. It is important to really investigate the software in detail with respect to this need.  There are products that claim to be account centric, there are products that claim to be contact centric, and there are those that supposedly do both.

One of the best questions to get a clear answer on is: If I work with Joe, and Joe works at ABC Company, where do I run an account report from?

If you are advised to go to Joes record, the product is likely a contact centric product and you will have difficulties managing a true business account with it.  An example of why this is true: Mary joins ABC Company as head of ABC’s division 2, your company is an HR Services company and you will be providing resources to Joe and Mary’s divisions.

Where do you go to run a company wide report about your business with ABC Company?  In a contact centric system it is virtually impossible and is many times done with “smoke and mirrors” and of course much human resource.

If you are told to go to the “account record” an run the report from there, then you are indeed in an account centric data structure.  An account data structure will allow the “rollup” abilities where all pending, history, details, product purchases, etc. are available on one record.

If you are in a position where this is a concern of your business, feel free to contact us for a detailed analysis of your needs.  We not only advise in this area, but enjoy the process and can assist you in becoming familiar with choosing the proper database management tools.

For more information about CRM systems click here.

It certainly would seem to be true as we see the X,Y, and Z generation walking around or worse yet driving while using messaging.  Instant messaging and emailing has grown at a rate never experienced in history. Everyone seems to “be connected”.   Most of those messaging systems are some version of Outlook.

In the world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and sales force automation (the older SFA), Outlook has been a difficult communication tool  to deal with.  Microsoft has not always allowed or been open to developers knowing how to integrate to and from Outlook to other applications.  In fact, even the 1st couple of versions of MicroSoft CRM (now known as Microsoft Dynamics) did not communicate clearly and completely with Outlook.  Some might disagree, but recall the long cryptic message ID scheme in subject lines of the 1st few releases?  Enough said!

Today, as in the past, Outlook is with us in the business and personal realms of day-to-day life. It is time that the CRM developers learn and accept the integration to Outlook.  Some have, and others still struggle to get there.

What should a good Outlook link contain?

1. Email connectivity – to Outlook (from CRM) and from Outlook (to CRM)
2. Contact connectivity – ensure that contacts are available in Outlook that are in CRM and vice-versa
3. Calendar connectivity – it is critical that appointments and tasks created in Outlook (or the connected PDA/phones) get back into the CRM system; in addition tasks and appointments created in the CRM should be in the Outlook calendaring

There are a few including RedHorse CRM that have accomplished these important links as to not leave the Outlook user disconnected from the CRM system and connecting these Outlook users into the CRM system.  No longer is CRM and Outlook different worlds.

In the RedHorse Outlook Link (RHOLink03/07) the integration is comprehensive.

1. RedHorse can be configured to sync email, contacts and calendars, or any combination thereof; all managed from within Outlook.
2. Documents attached/embedded in Outlook messages are handled according to the document management configuration in RedHorse, controlled by the settings in Outlook.
3. Configuration of all record types handled in Outlook in one settings area.
4. RedHorse has the ability to determine how to handle email addresses in Outlook that are in the RedHorse Database and automatically sync them without user interruption, and to handle emails that are not in the RedHorse database differently.
5. RedHorse can be configured to use Outlook as the “fulltime” email messaging client while maintaining the full view of communications within the CRM.
6. RedHorse does not have to be running to synchronize with Outlook, so long as the SQL Database is accessible. This provides for remote access to RedHorse while still utilizing a local Outlook instance.

If you are ready to integrate Outlook as a valued tool for your customer database or CRM system, contact us.

Is Outlook a CRM?

The product is performing as expected but it seems my 15 year old data is an issue. Apparently our data is not as clean as we thought. Seems that our upgrade after upgrade since 1991 has not been as clean structurally as the converter routines would like. Also, our data has been sliced and diced with every imaginable tool over the years.  I suspect that has a lot to do with it.

Ended up speaking with the support department. Found that there is indeed bad data in some of the fields. For example, “3/2/2″ in a field that should be like “08:00″ and so on. Small amounts but in this computer data world, one character incorrect is one-to-many.

So, we had to create short routines to clean up the data in the known bad fields. Not too bad just unexpected.

Next, the process moved into converting our GoldMine contact2 data. Oh now that was a bit more interesting as it was one of those not so obvious problems to resolve. The support person ran a manual process which was the same code from the converter and it worked without flaw. Nice, now we only have E-mail to deal with.

Ran that process separately using the wizard. Runs smoothly with only dialogs popping when our mailbox records have unrecognized/illegal characters in the database. This process is slow as it must move files according to the document management settings we had set during post-installation configuration. Seems to be ‘garbage’ data in the records once every few thousand records.

All in all, more time consuming than expected but then again, I expected that. After all it is computer data land!

Will continue answering dialogs on the bad paths and will report back. I now have 4 hours into the conversion – mostly waiting for conversions though. Could be doing other things – such as writing blogs.

PS. Suggested a new pre-convert test tool to the developer.  Is cleaning our data the programs responsibility?

Our current system:

1. GoldMine – the central point of all activities and information -We live ” if it’s not in GoldMine it didn’t happen”.
2. TeleSupport HelpDesk – the customer service software that tracks all service activities and stats of such
3. QuoteWerks – the quoting and proposal generation software, all our years of products, templates, etc are there.
4. QuickBooks – the accounting software which is the end of the line

All our current products have years of information, they are connected although roughly and with special expensive-to-maintain connection programs.  We have years of add-on utilities that we’ve come to depend on.  A bit scary!

Those that may be familiar with our company may find this post amusing since installation and setup of CRM systems is our core business. But, as is true with many things in life, it is more difficult emotionally to change oneself than it is to supervise and execute a change for others.

As with any project, we’ve done our pre-switchover training, testing, cleansing, and in fact we are certified experts in the product we are switching to. We have done a few (try a few hundred over the years) of these conversions for others with success; we even can call in the forces (aka. Chief Developer) if needed as we are close to the company and its founders. But still, the small concerns are there as we all know there are unpredictable challenges at every software upgrade, update or installation.

We are confident that we will have some significant learning curves regarding the change of our paradigm but here we go.

Listed below are the known items of concern and I am confident I will return with more as time progresses.

A few of our items that must be addressed:

1. Document Management / Template Naming conventions in the new system.  This is a time we can use to clean up a bit of the legacy pieces.
2. Need to train the team a bit more on Filters/Sorting – we utilize filters and sorting heavily in our marketing efforts.  The RedHorse CRM is much more powerful in this respect but again, a difference we must deal with.
3. Support Tickets: Our current methods utilize the TeleSupport HelpDesk product line that we sell, service and support
4. Extended details – GoldMine’s details have ‘behind the scenes’ information that during a first round of testing, the extended pieces didn’t move quite appropriately.
5. Mergecodes: We use merge codes to determine who we have permission to communicate with via Email, Fax and telephone, etc. (we use filters/groups for what goes to them)
6. AutoDial:  we use yet another product to dial the phone (nope, not our fingers – we use TapiLink and TeleVantage).  I worked with the developer on the Skype and Tapi Dialing testing so we should be good here.
7. Web Imports:  As you might imagine, we use our web import forms heavily.  It is probably one of the most common methods for us of receiving new leads into the system.  We even use the forms to add new leads ourselves due to its automation abilities.
8. Quote Templates:  We have years of templates built mostly in QuoteWerks but in GoldMine as well.  Those will have to be recreated as they do not convert.
9. Service Agreements:  In our system we track service availability time.  Meaning, how much prepaid support time does a customer have.  RedHorse has a much more detailed and thorough system for this but we will have to re-enter the service agreement balances.
10. Invoice templates:  RedHorse will be used to send the service usage “Invoices” or shall we call them “Usage Notices”.  We will need to design those templates as well.
11. Quickbooks Import / CleanUp:  We will be using the Quickbooks items list to populate the quoting systems available parts and labor codes.  We, as most companies do, have a few (or more) items which were not used and are no longer necessary to carry along.  This means a bit of clean up in Quickbooks so we don’t pull ‘garbage data’ into the quoting system.
12. E-mail Accounts:  We will need to reproduce our email credentials in the RedHorse system as most of our users monitor multiple e-mail accounts.  Just a few moments per user to add those.
13. ArgoSoft: We use a 3rd party smtp program called Argosoft to handle our mass e-mails outbound for marketing.  We have not tested RedHorse with this but it should be rather straight forward as it is just another SMTP address.
14. SigFiles:  We will need to create our sigfiles in RedHorse – again small but came up in conversations.
15. E-mail Templates:  This one could be a time consumer as we utilize e-mail templates for most communications, product deliveries, registrations, lead management, etc.  Again fairly easy in RedHorse but minutes none the less.
16. Support Staff Readiness:  Those of us on the team who have spent time training, learning, experimenting and fumbling will have new experiences but those who were not in the loop will have major setbacks in terms of productivity.  A new training curve is about to happen.

At this point we I am ready to go to the server and make sure all appropriate backups from last evening are intact, USABLE, and ready to roll.  Remember backups are USELESS if not USABLE (more on that in another article.)

Will return!!