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Old 12-15-2012, 06:33 AM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
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Another idea.

You know CRM sw; you (rather successfully) try to replicate most of its functionality within a system like UR (= you can sort / search by multiple criteria, Boolean search, and hit "tables" (lists, at least), with coding, lots of data interpretations are possible in UR).

Now for the advocates of "Have your customers / prospects handy by mm maps" (One-page methos, etc.) - it's evident that for analysis of your customer / prospects base, mm is near worthless; on the other hand, when in important / decisive contact with a customer / prospect, it's evident that even standardized and more or less "encoded" data isn't that obvious: Within your UR data about him, there'll be lots of text, flurrying in front of your eyes, and after the conversation, chances are you'll have overlooked important details.

Now what about a macro building up a standardized "customer map" for him (= MM in your second screen, UR would remain visible in your main screen), almost in real time

(make it the first 10 or 15 sec. (= slow comp) of an important phone call you receive from him, let alone a biz call on his premises (where the same macro would build up such a map but which you'd then edit / refine manually, and probably print out)),

from your standardized customer data in UR? It'd create a new map, and from your UR paragraphs (= form), beginning with £a=texttexttext, £b=somemoretext, etc., it'd build up main topics, under which it'd put the further paragraphs als children, or even putting further text, within a given £c section, into MM notes, leaving only the very first 150 or so characters within the corresponding sub-topic.

You'd have standard sections, as said, and if a standard section is empty, the correponding MM topic wouldn't even be created, but if there are important elements to consider, they would be literally thrown into your face, with red symbols, yellow background color and whatever, and this is especially useful when it will not have been yourself who took the complaint of this customer, last time, but a collegue of yours: Here, an almost-instantly appearing "red sign" in an MM map would be of tremendous help, instead of getting (or not), within the depths of your text commentswithin UR, to this info only after 60 sec., and after your customer did plenty of rant on you, during which you desparately will have tried to find the corresponding details he's ranting about again.

Getting to the same info, within UR, would mean frantic scrolling (and would suppose perfect, bling-bling formatting anyway that's often not present), or even more frantic shifting back and forth within 3 or 4 sub-items in UR with respect to this customer. (You try to find the details, while your customer checks you don't hear him but with one ear - most of your attention being absorbed by your trying to get to the decisive info in your text.)

And even when there were NO such probs between your company and your customer, even when it's all just trying to satisfy him in the best possible way: As soon as you ain't the only contact for your (possible) customers any more, or just get too many of customers / prospects to deal with, such an INSTANT INFO upon what preoccupies the person on the phone, would not be extremely handy, but would leave a perfect impression on the customer/prospect, re your professionalism - he'll be really impressed (not if you spoke together yesterday, but if your collegue - or even yourself - discussed the matter 3 weeks ago: he'll think, wow, my prob is always present in this guy's mind, it would be advantageous for me to buy from him, instead of some of his competitors! - instant availability of the CORE info means, for your customer, he's constantly in your mind (even when he's not).

And since you know all this, your own stance here will be very easy, no searching around for the core info, you're safe you'll get it instantly... and this will relax you in a spectacular way that will communicate to your caller, again reinforcing his impression of your incomparable competence (btw, the same applies to any other element of your business knowledge: easy access, easy going, perfect proof of competence).

Now for the macro, it could even further this strategy by building up the really important main topics first, i.e. not by the order of standard-encoded text paragraphs in your UR file, but searching first for any non-standard, "currently important" coding, and thus, you will be able to read these current core elements of your customer relationship as soon as your macro starts to build up the corresponding map, even when the completion of this construction effort in front of your eyes will take 15 seconds.

As you see here, the only delay being, how much time will it take to display the "main" item of the customer/prospect in question, within sw like UR, AS or such this will be very quick, and whenever possible, have another routine (also possible by macros) to fetch the phone number of your caller from within your phone system, in order to display the corresponding UR page almost instantly - and then, the building up of the corresponding MM map could even have been automatically started!

Now for some seemingly coding prob: One collegue put the "current prob" code into the UR text, some day, i.e. a ££ anywhere in the corresponding paragraph. Now it's a customer of longer date, so there are let's say 4 or 5 such "££" within the text - what's the "current" one, then? (And remember, trying to force your collaborators, or even to force yourself, to administer such codes, would be a hopeless venture: no time for that, and error-prone as hell on top of that.)

No problem, though: Whenever such codes are put into your UR text, the corresponding little macro will also enter the date of creation of that code. And of course, the map-building macro then would SORT these "current prob" codes, by date, and start to build up the map with the REAL current such prob paragraph, and then only add less recent "current prob" text passages, by creating "child" topics, or even by putting such probs into notes, e.g. when they are older than 6 months and are coded in the normal way, i.e. there would be codes like "prob forever" that wouldn't be buried this way even years after the fact - and if ever they get less important, why not change the triple £££ into the ordinary double ££, in order to make these ancient probs fade with time?

Similarly, your map-building macro would fetch data from your accounting sw, e.g., in order to have the recent command history of this particular customer (without having these numbers to be stored both in your accounting system and in your UR system), and similar for any relevant data concerning your customers and prospects: a certain standardization, by coding ordered paragraphs, but also "free encoding", i.e. codes wherever pleases you, and triggering the building-up of your respective info map (incl. Excel extracts, etc. - it's just about the power of your hardware and about its response times, there are no sw / programming probs whatsoever in all this).

As you can see here, efficient IM is MORE than just creating db's - but on the other hand, solid db's, as UR's, are the best possible way to store your raw data, from which then you'll get your graphical representations for instant - and that implies: pondered - access when your customer calls: data without perfect, instant orientation is not instant-access data, even if it's all on your screen without delay.

So, this post, at the end of the day is just another example of what I advocate above: Separate your "decisional" data from the depths of your raw data - and whenever possible, automate this process: but it's obvious that CRM is a field of predilection for such automatation: it's easy, from the moment on you think about the details applying to your business.

Most people dream of integrated solutions like SAP, but will never have them available; but that makes them overlook what home-made, easily affordable smart hybrid solutions can offer them, and in the field described, it'd be a quantum leap.
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