You’ll have heard of Customer Relationship Management systems – indeed you may already have one. It may be an integral part of your business - it should be at its very core.
To achieve this requires a CRM product that’s flexible enough to hold whatever information you need to know about your clients or customers, contacts and prospects. Many CRM products are implemented as basic card index systems.
To be truly effective your system should include a relational database. document management software for law firms So that information is entered once only. Associated records are simply linked together.
If you need to know the bank details for all your customers you store the relevant bank names & addresses once. Then for each customer you simply record the bank reference.
Not only is this more efficient it also means that it’s incredibly easy to extract a list of all customers who bank at a particular branch.
Take a few minutes to think of examples for your business ……
Your CRM solution should also be integrated with your document management system.
Unless your CRM and document management systems are integrated you’ll be generating paper between them. You’ll also miss out on the immediate access to information that a totally integrated solution can bring.
If you’ve managed mailing campaigns you’ll know how time consuming they can be.
Identifying your target market
Producing the personalised letters or emails to those selected clients
Keeping track of those who’ve replied
Following up those who haven’t.
This should be an easy process if your CRM database is integrated with your document management system. It’ll be very inefficient if it’s not.
So are we there yet?
Not quite. There are two more aspects to consider …..
It’s impossible these days to underestimate the impact that the Internet and Email has on businesses. I’ll guess yours is no exception.
