CRM Software Support: Take Charge of Activities within your CRM
If you counted all the activities for each of your users, what would you see? It would vary greatly. Some users don’t schedule anything. They just enter the results of calls, meetings or to-dos. Others schedule everything. The operative question, though, is how many users schedule something to do then don’t clear it from their calendar? Maybe they attended the meeting, but didn’t complete it in your CRM. That means they probably didn’t record what happened during the meeting. You are losing information. Other times, maybe someone scheduled a call-back and never actually made the call. They meant to make that quarterly call but were side-tracked getting that big proposal out. Now it’s time for the next quarterly call.
We all have our own way of working with activities. A few of our clients actually require their staff to use activities in a particular way. Our recommendation – make a policy and evaluate compliance and if it is achieving what you want.
We have noticed that activities tend to accumulate. Happens to me all the time. I forget to complete a meeting and enter the notes. Calls and to-dos that weren’t made accumulate. They probably weren’t necessary but would have been ‘nice to haves’.
Unless you are running a call center and have automation in place to schedule out-bound calls and evaluate your reps based on call volume, there is little point in trying to manage this area too stringently. It is good to keep an eye on the accumulation of activities to make sure that they don’t pile too high, but it is more important to make sure that history is entered properly. Encourage your users to clean out their uncompleted activities periodically just to keep the system running smoothly.