Originally reponsible for Financial Control in various companies and at various levels, I can look back now and see how the salesmen were all starved of information.

There was no real way of informing them promptly about late payments or new sales orders or support calls or new product developments or project progress or recent letters or changes to meeting arrangements nor was there a way of them doing their own thing effectively eg sending letters, arranging meetings, sending out newsletters, exchanging emails with their support and product development teams or their project managers.

The problem with the early CRM products seems to be that they weren't able to provide this service either or couldn't do it promptly and as a result the salesmen got no benefit from using it and lost interest in those systems. The new systems address the salesmen's needs competely and as a spin-off, because the same information is available to everyone in the company they enable everyone to become a participant in the whole customer relationship ethos.

In addition it has become much easier and simpler to personalise and tailor a solution unique for each individual company.

Almost everyone I meet still has to use a personal contact database as the corporate database is too slow or is inaccurate. For our part we're ready now for the next round of mobile phones (that is the ones with WiFi and VoIP as well as traditional mobile phone use) as we can access all areas of our corporate 'CRM' system direct from the mobile phone. WiFi and VoIP will eliminate some of the call charges.

In fact this is a small add-on as the whole system can be addressed now from a WiFi enabled laptop from any of the tens of thousands of WiFi HotSpots. We also use Internet Telephony for our company switchboard, so we can plug a handset into the laptop and 'Hey Presto' we are equipped exactly as if we are in the office, receiving incoming calls and calling up colleagues free of call charges.

Hopefully we're now building an environment which salesmen, and anyone who is 'customer-facing', will really love.

So that's my description of a CRM system,

Regards
Cliff
www.e-advantagesolutions.co.uk