New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
The description I saw was that task tracking is a feature of CRM's. I'd expect that tracked tasks look something like tickets, even if they go under a different name. E.g. task #1234 is assigned to MikePT, has priority 2, title xyz, description blah, timestamped comments, etc. Basically like a ticket.
If the tasks don't look like tickets, I'd be interested to know what they do look like.
It's really not about time tracking. It's more about managing the relationship with a customer - contacts with calendaring and activity management would be the most simple use - bit it can include tickets. For me, we are a small boutique consultancy with about 6 people and we work with about 30 companies between us. Each of those companies may have anywhere from 3 to 5 different people that we interact with. And any of us could be doing a project or pitching a project so a CRM tool helps us make sure we don't step on each other. We all do bizdev to bring in new customers so we also use our CRM as a sales funnel and for deal management. It just a much better way to manage what's going on without a lot of overhead.
In larger companies that I've been at - 100+ account managers with several hundred business customers, the CRM tool lets us assign accounts to specific individual or teams. A lot of activities are managed through the CRM like meetings, various projects, contract info, etc.
There's lots of different ways to cut it. I mentioned earlier that some people look at CRM from a ticketing perspective. I've also come across companies that look at it from a marketing angle and they may use a marketing platform like Hubspot and then overlay their CRM capabilities.
In my case, I use it primarily for deal management.
Some places may just use shared contact managers with calendaring to manage their customer activities. It really depends on the business and their customer management lifecycle. One of earliest CRM precursors in the 80's was ACT! which was basically an electronic roledex with activity management, calendaring, and multiuser support. That's still the way a lot of people do customer management.
@willie So the role of a CRM is largely for sales activity and generally is your source for every bit of info related to a customer account.
So you have customer contact info (address book part - dealing with company + all the contacts at each company), notes on their account about their needs and company details or important info about them needed to make a sale, and then when they buy something you keep tabs on what they've bought, how much they spent, etc.
It keeps tabs on communication, so most systems let you send email directly from the CRM, BCC something into a special address which will note it on their file, or manually log call activity and other communications.
Then it has a deals section which is your sales funnel and where each lead that has come into your system is currently at in the buying process. You can track a customer from them being a lead, to collecting more info on them, to shipping a quote, to quote approval/contract signing, payment collected, etc.
On top of that it has reminders and other features so you get a report of people you need to follow up with each day, email scheduling, etc etc. It can get as big and complicated as you want it, or as stripped down as a spreadsheet to track leads & customers.
In different jobs I've used Salesforce, Pipedrive, FreshSales - there are hundreds of options. It's a way to keep tabs on every person that has interacted with your business and know whether or not they're a customer already and what interactions they've had with your coworkers/employees.
If you're in a high $$, low volume business like web design/development/etc - I'd say stick to something like Trello or Jira and just keep tabs on people that way, or even just a spreadsheet may work.
If you're in a higher volume business where you're talking hundreds/thousands of customers then you need a proper CRM like Salesforce, etc to be able to deal with thousands of folks, dozens/hundreds of products, 10s of thousands of purchases, yada yada.
If you're launching a new product/service that fits perfectly with folks who bought X, you don't want to email blast or manually call/message everyone. You might want to sort by people who bought a certain product, is in a certain industry, purchased in the last 6 months and spent over $XXXX - and then manually reach out to those people via email/call.
Now, regarding 'task tracking' - you should only really be tracking sales/customer activity in a CRM. If you want an all-in-one that handles your project management, you're better off looking at multiple tools.
Thanks for these explanations. I still see a fairly straightforward CRUD app at the bottom of things, so it amazes me that companies are making billions at it and I can't help thinking about how to get my hands on some of that. But, the amount of glitz that users expect from such things now is not my style at all, so I guess I won't worry too much. I might look at some screen shots sometime just to be sure. I tend to prefer old-school interfaces for just about everything.
Well sure - so is an accounting system. But...
There are multiple billion-dollar-selling CRM products. Salesforce is a great example. CRM is their sole product and they're an $8bn/year company. It's not glitz - it's having a platform to extend and all the integrations, which are nontrivial when you have hundreds of enterprise systems.
And frankly, 99.9% of humans don't want an "old school interface". They want something that seamlessly syncs data on all their platforms, has a lot of customizable logic about sales campaigns and the sales pipeline and customer contacts, and is easy for nontechnical people to use and extend.
Ive never used a worse issue/ticket tracking system than Jira...
Jira is the best ticketing system I’ve used.
Jira is the worst ticketing system I’ve used.
It can be either depending on the competence of the admin of your particular instance. You can customize Jira into either glory or stupidity.
truer words were never spoken