Of course you track activities and relationships with individuals and organizations that are paying clients; that is essential for billing, selling, follow-up, etc. But, what about work that you do not bill for? What about “good will” activities done to support those relationships? These activities might include training, site visits, phone calls or meetings or any other way that your team reaches out to benefit your clients. There are good reasons that those activities should be tracked too.
Paying or not, your clients are the reason you are in business. If they change their minds about doing business with your company, you want to know why. You want to know that your employees have done all they can to maintain those relationships. So you are looking not only at the products or services that you sell, but those you provide as follow up and help.
- A nonprofit agency using Microsoft Dynamics® CRM visits and educates lending offices about the programs they offer. They don’t charge for this outreach, but by tracking their activities, management can quantify and report their time spent as required by the government of Massachusetts who guarantees their funding.
- A wealth management firm using Dynamics CRM is diligent about tracking their relationships with their clients, proving to them how valuable they are to their business.
Crowe EditAble CRM Grid is designed to track whatever relationship is important to your company; in this case, it is non-billable activity. Crowe EditAble CRM Grid is specifically designed to work flawlessly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to allow you to turn any form into a grid similar to Microsoft Excel. Data can be easily updated, grouped and organized for an up to the minute view of your activities on behalf of your clients.
Grouping Goodwill Activities by Type
With Crowe EditAble CRM Grid you can group all of your activities in Dynamics CRM by type. Perhaps you want to see how many phone calls, meetings or emails were made by a specific rep to a specific account. Update quickly and efficiently, add details and notes, edit inline just as you do in Excel, without opening separate windows. Edit all accounts or just one or two, as you wish.
Calculating Duration of Goodwill Activities
You can customize the activity form to include a dropdown for “duration” so every activity (such as a phone call) entered can have the duration tracked.
You can look at all activities of your team by the day/week/month using different filters for a grid, calling it, for example, “This Week” and roll up the duration numbers for each type of contact or activity.
This makes it easy to quantify these “goodwill” activities.
What Can You Do with Goodwill Activity Reports?
You may want to send summary information to your customers periodically, outlining the activities you have performed on their account. This shows not only their value to you, but also your value to them. Because your employees should be accountable for certain levels of “goodwill” activity, these reports are a way to make sure that everyone is on track. Of course the reports can also be used to hold your team accountable.
Does Tracking Goodwill Activities Really Matter?
If you want to track these activities, you have to make it easy for your employees. Because the time is not billable, your employees may not see the value in entering the date. Without complete compliance, the reports won’t be useful. Using Crowe EditAble CRM Grid makes entering these activities in a simple Excel like grid format extremely easy. And the value to your organization can be tremendous.
There are so many ways you can expand the use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM beyond the traditional “client” relationship. The term CRM has been replaced by XRM. C equals customer but X equals any type of entity.