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.
– Lack of customer knowledge
As information in any Excel files is presented in table format, there is no way for people to fill the related information like any interactions with any contacts. Management of activities can only be done in, for example, Outlook, Google calendars or call reports in Word, and overview of contact profiles requires a lot of administrative and unnecessary effort in collecting fragmented information from anywhere.
– Single file for multiple users
Many of my customers have been trying to keep a single file manipulated by all users, and experienced a lot of hassles like data loss, prolonged waiting for simple actions like opening a file or browsing different records when number of records grows to a few thousands. Such behavior indeed “encouraged” different people in handling “their own” data and thus scattering information is resulted to ruin management.
– Many more…
We are in the world of limited resources and thus things are only done with “reasons”. When there is no “reason” to open the contact files (e.g. updates of any activities or opportunities), they are simply not opened and thus out-of-date. Just think when many businesses are trying hard on acquiring a new customer that requires a lot of effort, but in the meantime surprisingly letting their valuable customers idle in their Excel files, I am sure you will make the right decision sooner but not later.
