SHAREPOINT FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP
SharePoint’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) facilities provide a powerful and effective solution that uses Outlook Integration features to make client details readily available from where ever you are.
Microsoft’s standard template for CRM provides a good starting point for tailoring a system to your requirements. Customisation of contact list fields and views with the ability to create fields of your own type to enable ready segmentation and categorisation of the data to enable it to be organised and used in an effective fashion.
By utilising the standard SharePoint feature “Connect to Outlook”, CRM lists may be visible from within Outlook and enabling its use as an address book for email addresses and phone numbers. A copy of the data is cached on the local PC so when a mobile user takes a notebook computer travelling, the data will travel with them. Updates to the data will also be synchronised back to the master list when the user re‑connects the notebook to the network.
By utilising the Alert Me facility, new entries or changes to data in the lists can be automatically alerted to the team either on each individual change / addition or in omnibus editions daily or weekly enabling staff to be aware of developments without having to go looking for it.
For one client we created a straight‑forward CRM enabling linking ultimate clients / prospects, intermediaries and internal business relationship managers together and additionally provide facilities to record activity events with each contact.
With a centrally available resource across the group, our client’s business relationship managers can readily access detailed contact information, activities that have taken place – both ad‑hoc and planned marketing activities.
Integrated Event Management
Planning of events is catered for using Workspaces enabling the marketing team to collate and share event information centrally, all accessible from the same portal.
Whatever your CRM requirements the standard SharePoint CRM features can be extended to meet many requirements without the expense of a implementing a full blown dedicated CRM package.
