Most healthy companies run payroll at about 25-30% of total expenses, and that is a lot of money that can be wasted if your employees are not performing to the level that you expect. Sometimes this is because employees do not have the motivation to do the job at the highest level, and that has to be handled through coaching and employee training, but other times the issue has more to do with productivity losses due to poor tools. Perhaps it’s time for you to use a CRM software.
If you are considering to use a CRM tool to be more productive, I recommend you SugarCRM. Its interface is a powerful instrument that can grow your business rapidly, but sometimes productivity will still lag behind. The right modules to customize the Sugar interface can drastically reduce that lost productivity and help you increase sales and profits. These are three of the most popular productivity modules for SugarCRM.
Callinize
You never want customers to have to call in with complaints or issues, but sometimes you will have to provide service to customers after the sale. In the customer service sector a lot of time is wasted by your employees when they have to dig around for information about the customer or they have to ask for an obscure order/tracking number just to get a starting point to help solve the issue. The customer gets frustrated and the calls begin to back up, so the customer experience becomes very poor.
With Callinize you can eliminate many of those problems by adding some muscle to your pre-existing caller id system. The Callinize module integrates with Sugar so that when a customer calls the app automatically launches and the customer service representative has all of the information that they could possibly need about the customer. That way when the rep talks to the customer for the first time they can get right to addressing the customer’s issue instead of asking for information, reducing call times and increasing productivity.
Duplicate Detector
The point of your Sugar interface is to make customer collection and recall much easier, but this can become a problem when employees create duplicate data sheets for customers. Many times this is the result of laziness or miscommunication between departments, but too many data sheets means that something can get missed and employees may not have all of the current information that they need.
Duplicate Detector flags potential duplicate entries and forces your employees to make sure that the new data actually reflects a new customer and is not simply data that belongs someplace else. The removal of the duplicate entries cuts down on the time spent looking for data and employees will not waste time creating data sheets they do not need.
SynoCalendar
As your company grows and you have many different employees scheduling meetings becomes a real hassle. This is even more true if your sales staff spends a lot of time out of the office making sales calls, and you are never sure when they will be around for meetings.
The SynoCalendar is a very easy to use drag and drop interface that lets management schedule meetings by coordinating time slots between multiple employees at one time. Now you will know when employees are scheduled to be available and you do not have to waste time hunting them down for the information. Once the event is scheduled the calendar is automatically updated for the employees and they know that you expect them to be around.
Inefficiency and wasted labor dollars can stifle the growth of a new company, but sites like Sugar Outfitters provide modules to your SugarCRM client so that you can increase productivity lost by poor tools. Other productivity problems may exist, but those require a more personal touch.
About the Author: I am Brianna Thomas and I have been a medium sized business manager for eight years. When we cut staff in 2011 I adopted these productivity tools to help our employees spend their time at work more effectively, and though we lost staff, productivity actually increased in every department.
