CRM is an Umbrella for Bad Weather
Over the past couple of weeks here in the Northeast we have started to get reminded about the impending weather that we get hit with right around the time the holidays come and the ball drops in Times Square. How bad it will be is anyone’s guess, but we had snow in October this year if that is any indication. Al Roker or Sam Champion I am not but I can tell you that every year I sit down with some executives of companies after that fact telling me that they wish that they could have done something to shelter themselves from taking a hit to revenue whenever the weather brings them to a standstill. One executive fixed his problem last year by moving his company and himself to Florida. But, if that’s not in the cards for you, there are several things that you can do to keep up productivity whenever your staff (especially sales staff) is affected by the weather. I thought I would share some of what my customers have told me in recent years related to their CRM capabilities.
If your CRM solution is accessible anytime and anywhere via mobile or browser this can make all the difference in the world. If you get stuck in an airport or snowed in after visiting relatives you may still be able to have a productive day on the phone, planning your upcoming sales visits, or reviewing customers and prospects to drum up new business. If you are a manager you can quickly get an assessment on where your staff is and what they are doing if you need to have people cover for other people if not everyone is affected by the weather. If you happen to be in the world of customer service you can also stay on top of what’s happening because the phone doesn’t stop ringing just because the weather turned sour. In fact, one of our customers started letting some service people work from home occasionally as a reward after they found out productivity wasn’t greatly affected when working from home.
For those people that have the benefit of an integrated CRM and ERP system the benefits can go even further. Some of our customers are able to create invoices, apply refunds and credits, handle sales order and invoice processing and even keep up with project time and billing using the capabilities from the CRM system remotely without needing access to the financial system. Service people can answer questions remotely related to orders and payments or process returns and never have to leave the comfort of a fireplace or a home office. Now we are advancing the capabilities of the new tablet technologies and working with customers that want to have remote order entry from an Android or iPad device while working in the field.
Now as you head into the office on a bright sunny day you should ask yourself if CRM can give you some cover for that bad weather that will be here before you know it.
Related Post: Are You Prepared to Weather an Outage?
