Is Your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System Doomed To Fail?Written by Perry Norgarb
“Right, People. Let’s blast out that mail campaign we’ve been planning for so long.”It’s time to put your trusty CRM software to work; to let it earn its keep. You run a search of people and companies you want to target. You soon realize something’s wrong when your list is far smaller than anticipated. A quick check reveals many profiles/categories have not been filled in, impacting your search results. Further inspection shows numerous records are incorrect; others are riddled with typos. And that’s just for starters. With a sinking feeling, you realize that last push isn’t going to happen in a hurry. Time for some Damage Control or Preventative Maintenance. Fortunately one of most common reasons cited for high failure rate of CRM systems - poor data quality - is also one of easiest to avoid. Your CRM software is only as good as information it contains. As old programmers motto goes ‘garbage in, garbage out’. So how can you avoid incomplete, incorrect, irrelevant or out-of-date and generally unfit-for-use data from permeating your CRM software? You need to gather your key CRM users together and thrash out a DATA CAPTURE PROCEDURE document, defining rules of use. Spell out: •Who has what rights to system; who can Create, Insert, Modify or Delete records, assuming your software supports all these functions? Forward this information to your system administrator to action. •Decide on a procedure to check for any duplicates before creating a record. Depending on what ‘de-duping’ or ‘data scrubbing’ features your system has, this might require some simple searches before starting a new record. •Do you allow abbreviations or acronyms? For example: IBM, or I.B.M, or International Business Machines Inc. or Incorporated and so on. A policy on ensuring consistency of input will help to avoid duplications in future. •Are records going to be created in Upper and Lower case and when are CAPS acceptable? •By when do you expect records, notes and so on to be created or updated? Same day, on return to office? •Check to see whether your Postal Services have specific requirements. Ensure your data meets these criteria. •Is primary address of clients to be created as a postal or a physical address? •Make sure everyone checks spellings if they are unsure and do not trust spellchecker! When in doubt, ask client – they’ll respect that. Is it Clark with an ‘e’; Shawn, Sean or Shaun? One certain way to get your mail binned is to spell someone’s name incorrectly. •Also confirm kind of corporation e.g. LLC, Inc, PTY Ltd. and so on. •Make rules for creating new profiles or User Definable Fields (UDF) (or whatever your specific CRM software calls them.) Place a lot of emphasis on this. Every time a new UDF is needed, it should first be approved. Otherwise duplicates will permeate your database e.g. Lead Source: Yellow Pages, YP, yelo pages. •Ensure that email addresses are put in correctly. Basic but common mistake! •Set up procedures, if not supported by your software, of how to create records from inbound emails. •If applicable, are you going to use Mandatory/Forced fields?
| | How to Stop Spyware from Infecting your System Written by Ray Bonneau
Spyware is becoming more and more of a problem. When I visit a cusomters site and inspect computers I always find some kind of spyware on system. I know that many people have been unaware of spyware, but hopefully now that word is spreading that people will be more aware of problem and setup a good defense. I get a get calls or questions to effect of "Why is my computer running so slow? I just bought computer recently". Most of time this is because of spyware. Spyware programs will load on boot up and take up your computer memory that will reduce your performance. I will go over my typical setup to prevent and battle spyware. This system works if all of current spyware has been removed properly. I will leave that to another article.Spyware is loaded on a computer over Internet without user knowing. It is loaded in background through holes in a user's computer setup. Internet Explorer has been very vulnerable to spyware and is a major reason why so many people are getting infected. Spyware ranges from more benign programs to more extreme programs that will hijack your browser's startup page or cause pop ups to occur relentlessly. The following is defense system that I use, and I strongly suggest that you use. 1. Download and install all of latest updates to your software. Once a week you should be checking for software updates to install. This will help protect you against latest threats. 2. Use a firewall. Many people have a direct connection Internet and do not setup and run a personal firewall. This can potentially be very dangerous. Firewalls should be running for protection against many potential problems including hackers, spyware, and data protection. Windows XP has a built in firewall. Make sure you have updated your system to Service Pack 2 (SP2) if you have Windows XP. Microsoft has added many security features and fixed bugs in this update and should be updated as soon as possible. Sygate Personal Firewall is a free personal edition firewall that works pretty well. You can download it at http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm 3. Install and run Spybot Search & Destroy. Spybot is a great spyware detection and removal tool. This is a free tool that should be run often to make sure spyware has not been loaded onto your system. Every time that Spybot is used make sure that all of latest updates are downloaded first. Updating to latest Spybot files will allow detection and removal of latest spyware programs. You can download Spybot at http://www.safer-networking.org.
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