Some people think Outlook is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. Usually that's because those individuals have not experienced a true CRM system. Outlook leaves out the "relationship" portion of CRM. Outlook is a PIM (Personal Information Manager); its architecture is based around a single user design concept, not relationship building for a team.

Outlook can be used in a multi-user environment and it even appears to share information, but it does so in an indirect manner which is difficult and costly to fully utilize. In order to share information in Outlook, you will normally be copying others on communications and managing multitudes of individual items which do not connect to the activity or customer directly. That is costly for most businesses in terms of time, storage space, and image. It takes time to create all of those messages; time costs money. It requires storage space on corporate servers for all those copies of messages and invites; storage costs money. It takes tremendous effort and coordination to maintain a quality image by not repeating information unnecessarily and confusing the issues at hand; that takes time which costs money. One of the most difficult items to manage in Outlook is letters, proposals and documentation generated to a prospect or client. Where is the “real” proposal located? Possibly located in a directory with an encoded name? Are you expecting the sales team to understand directory structures and adhere to those definitions? A CRM system allows documents and files to be connected to the prospect/client record directly. Users don’t have to know or care where the object is physically located.

Let’s start by clarifying what a traditional CRM system is. CRM is Customer Relationship Management, or as we like to say Customer Retrieval/Retention & Modeling.

CRM systems are generally thought of as customer management systems but the best CRM systems also are heavily weighted toward prospecting for new customers, marketing to those that resemble your best clients, and capitalizing on data intelligence naturally available. A good CRM system will allow data collection in a natural “as executed” manner. Meaning, if the system is used fully, the data is there without extra effort; no extraneous keystrokes and no data entry for data entry purposes.

CRM means gathering and retaining information about a customer (or just as important, prospects who later become customers) in order to build a meaningful relationship for both the customer and for your business team. Once data is gathered a CRM system allows your team to use the information for marketing and relationship building on a single contact basis or by grouping on common characteristics. A grouping example is sending a product notice to your top 100 customers whom have purchased the green widget in the last 90 days. Try that in Outlook in under 15 minutes and without carbon copying (cc:) . That is a standard feature in a CRM system.

If you re-read the paragraph above while looking at or thinking about your Outlook, you will find that Outlook does not provide a tool set to enable most CRM features needed in today’s business climate. Many have just adapted to accept less than CRM features in our e-mail tool.

Gathering and retaining information: You do have the ability to gather and retain the name, phone, address, etc… but do not have anywhere to retain information about what you last talked about, what the customer last purchased, what the customer favors in color, sports, wines, or the like. You can schedule an appointment or a call, but can you note the results of such and send out a “Thank You” letter automatically. Can it pickup the meeting topic and include that with a discussion or white paper of the topic discussed? The answer is no, it can not – relationship portion is missing. You can manually of course, but you can’t easily get assistance from another team member or assistant unless you copy them on each activity and your notes.

Part of building a relationship in business is tracking communications, not just creating them. It is difficult to devise a human system in Outlook to indicate when an activity has been completed. Yes, on some items there is a complete checkbox, but do you want to trust that the box was indeed checked appropriately to represent attention to that large deal coming up?

Most true CRM systems today are far beyond the capabilities of Outlook. Many are in fact utilizing Outlook as the mail client it was designed to be. Outlook is the standard as an e-mail management tool. Products like SageCRM can be setup to be executed from within Outlook. SageCRM add’s a toolbar and linkage from Outlook directly into the SageCRM database and relationship management tools, thereby allowing the user to perform marketing campaigns and analysis of the prospect and customer database, while retaining the familiar Outlook environment.

Adding CRM capabilities to Outlook has been a goal of Microsoft for years. There has been (and still is) Microsoft Business Contact Manager (BCM) which is an add-on to Outlook that adds some of the depth discussed above. BCM add’s some depth but still lacks the strength of sharing data with your team. Microsoft developed a CRM system, Dynamics CRM (formerly known as Microsoft CRM – aka MSCRM). The Dynamics CRM system added the depth required of a CRM system inclusive of connectivity to other applications. Unfortunately, the MSCRM system has not become an industry favorite as it has been redesigned, renamed, over complicated and maintenance intensive. In time, Microsoft will fix those negatives as Microsoft does not lose!

Let’s face it, the best CRM is one that houses all the data within one seamlessly integrated environment available in any form, from any device at any time. That environment will contain an address book, a communications diary, a documentation library, accounting information, marketing tools, statistical analysis, business intelligence tools, and voice response. We can show you how to achieve that environment.

At TeamAutomation, we “Connect Software, Technology and Knowledge to Build Business” – Your Business.

To see the products and services we may assist you with see our contact management and CRM Software information.