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Why Is Excel Used As A CRM By Many Companies?

Nov 23, 2009 Business Management

Over the years Microsoft Excel really became the Swiss Army knife of software. You can accomplish easy tasks such as simple calculations or even advanced ones like managing the important data of a company. In the years that Excel has been around people got used to it and they know how to work with it. When now a new task has to be solved you immediately tend to start thinking about how it would work in Excel.

This is a quiet dangerous approach when it comes to the management of your company’s data. Is Excel really the right program to manage your customers? Think about the problems that arise when you want to work out of office? You can of course take a copy of the sheet with you and make your changes to it (but only if you knew before that you will need it). While this can be handled quiet easily if you are the only one working with the data it gets complicated when two or more people want to merge their data after editing.

Now let us have look at the major improvements that CRM software will bring to our everyday workflow. With a CRM it is possible to make assignments between appointments and contacts. This way you get a journal that can be looked up by co-workers. Now everyone can check what has been done with a customer before. Since professional CRM applications are network enabled and can handle multiple users, it is possible to manage user restrictions as well. Not everyone needs to have access to your VIP customers.

There are even many more advantages you gain by using CRM software. You can place calls to your customers directly from the program. Write emails to one of them or you may even create large lists of recipients filtered by certain criteria. It is also easy to print out a subset of items using a special formatting or searching for items with easy filter and grouping functions. Truly professional CRM applications with multiuser support offer many more useful functions like instant messaging with your team members or automated creation of contact items by parsing your emails.

So why do we need to think about all this? Isn’t everyone using such profitable software? No – even nowadays most small to medium size companies rely on the usage of standard tools like Excel. And this is mainly because people do not know that there are solutions that offer an easy user interface and can be installed for networked, multiuser work by an average PC user.

Frank Peters is senior project manager at soft-evolution, a europe based software company and innovative provider of Pimero, a team scheduling, task, email, note and contact manager.

categories: business optimization,rise production,enhance business,collaboration,CRM,organizing,self improvement

Tags: Business Management, business optimization, collaboration, crm, enhance business, Organizing, rise production, Self Improvement