5 Features That Can Improve Your Day

13 Feb 2014

The goal of any CRM system, when you get right down to it, is to make their users’ lives easier. OpenCRM was developed with this in mind and there are countless features that can be used to make your life that little bit easier. Whether it’s saving you time or just giving you the information you need to do your job.

I’ve selected five features that I use every day in our own OpenCRM system that make my life easier.

1. Custom Fields
We have a whole host of custom fields set up in our system, fields that are really only specific to our business. Every business has different needs and holds slightly different information on their customers or prospects. A cookery school might want to know if their prospective students have food allergies or a recruitment agency would probably want to keep a record of their contacts’ qualifications. Either way, the ability to add as many custom fields to your system is an absolute must, in my opinion.

2. Opportunity Pipeline
If you’re in sales, you know that it is absolutely essential to be able to see, at a glance, which of your ongoing opportunities are nearing closure, which are still in early days, and which are taking longer than you’d have expected to close. Using both the colour coding on the main opportunities page and the opportunity pipeline in OpenCRM, this information is available as soon as you land. This not only saves you time and allows you to focus your energies where they’re needed most, it gives your manager the ability to see how you are progressing through the month, without either of you needing to break off from your to-do lists to have a meeting.

3. Custom Views
Are there some searches you perform every day? Maybe they’re most simple searches: “All my leads based in London” of “All of my uncompleted calls.” But what about those more complicated searches: “All of my leads based in London who have not been contacted in the last month?” For this kind of search, you don’t want to have to spend the time programming it every day when you could just configure it once as a custom view and have the information readily available whenever you need it. Using custom views saves you time and effort, plus it means that you know it’s programmed correctly each time.

4. Email Templates
How many times a day do you send out the same email? “Please find attached the notes of our last meeting…” “In response to your enquiry…” “The attached invoice is for the period…” By using email templates, however, you can easily populate an email with the appropriate text, personalised using any of the fields on the associated record. The templates also ensure that your emails always have the right tone, message, and branding for your business.

5. FAQs
I know I’ve brought up our FAQ library in a fairly recent post, but I can’t stress enough how much I use it on a daily basis. I look up internal procedures that I’m a bit fuzzy on or to send out system how-to’s to new customers. It is, for me, a feature that makes my day easier, simple as that.

Do you use some or all of these? If not, could they be useful to you? If you don’t have all of these set up on your system or if you’re just here to scout the system, why don’t you head over to our demo and see for yourself whether these features or any others might make your life that little bit easier.