In the last article “Does CRM really help? Different answers to different people”, I tried to speculate why SMEs, particularly from Hong Kong and Asian countries, are still skeptical of whether CRM can help their business.
With the “live” customer database, SMEs can have plenty of options to choose how to reach their current and potential customers effectively. However, many businesses have failed in figuring out the importance and for it is far from possible to see the immediate benefits of implementing a CRM solution, bucks are usually “saved” on using the handy Excel to fulfill the needs.
With my 8-year consultancy experience, I have been helping a lot of businesses to migrate their Excel files to different CRM solutions, to solve the following problems:
– Free-style formatting
As there is no restriction, users can easily put information like how you meet in “Contact”, the whole address in “Country”, any kind of contact information into “Phone”, etc. that makes reviewing and searching of information extremely difficult. The inefficiency even aggravates when files are maintained by different people with different style of input.
