CRM – Minerva Accountants Bristol and Somerset

Once your business outgrows you and a few contacts on your phone it is worth implementing a proper CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Register with ICO (Information Commissioners Office) and pay the necessary fee. This will vary with the size of your business but starts at £40 per year. Ensure that you record all the ways that you will use personal data.

Choose a CRM system that suits your business needs. Do you want to track prospects or to hold more detailed information for existing customers. DO you need to include tasks and workflows? Do you want it to integrate to your emails or a a bulk mailing system?

Give all your team access to add, update, and generally use the system. This will ensure that they are informed before all client contact.

Regularly update and maintain customer data. This is one of your responsibilities under GDPR but it also makes sense for the business to hold the lates information

Use CRM analytics to improve customer relationships and to track which marketing campaigns are most effective

This is the busiest time of year for accountants and we’re often overwhelmed by contact from clients (in addition to the clients who never respond to any of our chasing letters/emails/calls). How accessible are you? And are you too accessible?

My preferred methods of communication is email and I’m able to file these in Outlook and in my CRM for ease of use if I need them later. Many clients prefer phone calls so I take notes and file them in with their other documents and my CRM.

So far, so good.

But I also do a lot on social media for my businesses so people often message me that way on Twitter, Linked In or Facebook Messenger. And sometimes via Instagram or WhatsApp which I don’t use for business. With so many different channels these often don’t get added to my CRM so I’m left with a vague recollection of a message and having to find which platform it was on.

If you have any ideas on how to manage all this I’d love to hear.

I do have some wonderful tools to help with accessibility:

• VOIP + Answer It takes messages and forwards them to me by email
• Melu chat on both my websites is run by human beings based on a series of FAQs that I sent to them and which they are augmenting. They also forward chat summaries to me by email
• Calendly.com is great for scheduling calls directly into my diary and I receive email notification of these too.
• Voicemail – if I don’t recognise a number on my mobile, or if I’m on another call, my voicemail will record messages for me to follow up later.

How do you manage all your incoming communications or are you too accessible?

Tag: CRM

Implementing a CRM system in your business