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90This is probably more of a process question than a technicial issue but i'd still appreciate any help you can provide.
We are finding that many of our sales staff are complaining about having to duplicate a lot of data when entering phone calls in CRM 4. The best example I have been given is when a member of our sales team makes a phone call and wants to record the outcome and then schedule a follow up in a few weeks time.
Currently they locate the contact and add an activity record recording the details of the call. The calls are often ad hoc and have not been scheduled previously.
Call 1 - Complete : I phoned Bob and he was interested in our widgets but wants to look into alternatives first
This is "Saved As Complete" so that when we run our activity reports we can see what calls have been made by each sales person.
We then create a follow up record of type phone call, schedule for a future date and have to enter a very similar set of notes so that they are easily visible when flicking through the task list.
Call 2 - Open - Phone Bob as he was interested in our widgets, he was going to look into alternatives.
As far as I can work out this is the correct course of action so that we can see one item in the history and one as an activity. From a users point of view its a bit cumbersome.
If our sales person was then to action the open task when the time comes around adding in the outcome and marking as complete then we have only duplicated the data once. What we are finding is that often this second call will be unsuccessful (contact out of office, on holiday, etc..) our sales staff want to record that they have made another call but this just results in call 2 being marked as complete and the details duplicated again in call 3.
I guess what I am trying to find out is how people classify when a call is complete? I understand that you can go into a phone call activity and add updates into the notes fields but this doesn't tend to give an accurate reading when trying to report on how productive the sales staff have been.
How are other people dealing with this process. I have been asking the users to make sure that they put meaningful data into the system rather than just a subject of "Follow Up" and a desciption of "Call Back" as I want the data to be useful when looking in for reporting purposes. However the amount of duplication this is causing seems to turning the users off the system a bit. Any ideas welcomed.
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