Managing Complaints in ACT!, Part 1

What do you do with a customer who contacts you with a genuine concern?  Do you track it?  It's easy to set up in your ACT database. Today we look at how to track complaints.  In Part 2 we look at how to report on them.



Great customer service drives sales.  We pride ourselves in customer retention, but do we take steps to manage how well we handle customer complaints so we can measure our retention efforts?


We take calls of different types every day.  Some of these calls could be classified as complaints. Successfully tracking these calls can be done by creating a custom activity type that allows everyone answering your phones to create a history thread on the path to resolution, and of course, retention.

From the Schedule menu, click Manage, then Activity Types......

Click on the Add button, and in the Add Activity Type dialog box type out "Complaint", browse for and select an.ico (icon) file, and Edit the two default Result Names and Add two others (shown below).

We use the prefix "Complaint" on each Result Name for reporting reasons we will look at in Part 2.

Now when the phone rings with a customer requiring attention, you simply create a History record on their contact record (keyboard shortcut CTRL-H), select the new Complaint activity with a resolution of "Complaint Inbound".  Each subsequent action taken (Complaint In-Process) will eventually lead to a final result of Complaint Resolved (here marked as the default), or Complaint Unresolved.

Use this feature to add other activity types specific to your own sales, marketing, or operational requirements.

NOTE: For robust complaint tracking contact me to help you create a custom table that would add more detail and reporting options, showing you search criteria, groupable/sortable/filterable list views connected to any/all top-level entities in your database.

CallOnCRM for Sage ACT!

Now you can automate your dialing with ANY phone or phone system from within your ACT! database, even your mobile phone or a rotary.  Yes, really.  How?  We are now carrying the new Call On CRM product that integrates with your Sage ACT! database.


Easy to install and configure the Call On CRM tool works seamlessly from your ACT! toolbar and from within your ACT! layout.  Automating calls from within your ACT! database will help you gain efficiencies with every call you make, or receive.  Never dial your contacts again. 

• One-click dialing
• Automatic call logs
• Auto Activity Scheduling
• Call histories
• Call transferring and conferencing
• SMS (text messaging)
• Incoming screen pop-ups
• Call buttons on your ACT layout
• Any phones work for one, or a hundred, users. Even mobile...

>click to view youtube vid (1:11m)<

Supported versions of Sage ACT!:

• Sage ACT! for Real Estate
• Sage ACT! Premium for Real Estate
• Sage ACT! for Financial Professionals
• Sage ACT! Premium for Financial Professionals
• Sage ACT! Premium 2008 (10.0) (EX Edition)
• Sage ACT! Premium 2008 (10.0) (ST Edition)
• Sage ACT! Premium for Web 2008 (10.0) (EX Edition)
• Sage ACT! Premium for Web 2008 (10.0) (ST Edition)
• All Sage ACT! verisons 2008-2012 (10.0 - 14.0)

Call Bevan Wistar at Zip City to get pricing and installation instructions.  If you use ACT!, and have a phone, contact us now to get your system set up before lunch tomorrow or register for your free 30-day trial.

Sage ACT! 2012 Event Calendar Management

How can you put something on everyone's ACT! calendar without scheduling an activity for them? Easy. With ACT! you can use Manage Events to place one-time, or recurring, events on your company calendar with just a couple clicks.

Use this little-known tool for scheduling holidays, company picnics, or even your birthday.


Here, having just emerged from our Trade Show planning meeting, we need to alert the Sales & Marketing team when our trade show has been scheduled. In addition to circulating an email we would like to add the event to our calendar. With a few clicks in ACT! the trade show will be featured prominently on everyone's calendar as you see here.

From the Schedule menu, click Manage, then Events...

Click on the Add button, and in the Add Event dialog box type out the name of the event (Trade Show, here), select the date, and select the duration.  Additionally, we can select whether the event is recurring, or not.

...and then you are done!  Now everyone knows the results of the planning committee.

**NOTE** 

If the events don’t display on your calendar, it may be that they have been turned off in Preferences.

Click Tools, Preferences, click the Calendar & Scheduling tab

Click Calendar Preferences button.

Put a check in the Display events option before exiting Preferences.

Here is a list of holidays you can use for the remainder of 2012:

Monday, May 28 - Memorial Day

Wednesday, July 4 - Independence Day

Monday, September 3 - Labor Day

Monday, October 8 - Columbus Day

Tuesday, November 6 - Election Day

Monday, November 12 - Veterans Day

Thursday, November 22/3 - Thanksgiving 

Tuesday, December 25 - Christmas Day

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - New Year's Day

Other days to mark on the calendar

Wednesday, February 22 - Ash Wednesday

Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - Leap Year

Sunday, March 11 - Daylight Savings Time

Saturday, March 17 - St Patrick's Day

Sunday, April 1 - Palm Sunday

Friday, April 6 - Passover

Friday, April 6 - Good Friday

Sunday, April 8 - Easter Sunday

Sunday, May 13 - Mother’s Day

Sunday, June 17 - Father’s Day

Saturday, September 1 - Not August Anymore Day

Sunday, September 16 - Rosh Hashanah

Tuesday, September 25 - Yom Kippur

Wednesday, October 31 - Halloween

Sunday, November 4 - Daylight Savings Time Ends

Saturday, December 8 - Hanukkah

Wednesday, December 26/30 - 'Tween Week

Monday, December 31 - New Year's Eve

For more tips and tricks, or to ask your own questions about ACT!, don't hesitate to call or email.

Sales and Marketing Philosophies in Sage ACT!

Do you need a sales process?  How would you go about developing one if you don’t have one or if the one you have does not reflect how your customers want to buy?

ACT! users are astute students of sales and marketing philosophies, adopting tools to engineer better results.  You may be aware that Sage ACT! itself evolved into its present state through 25 years of development beginning with Pat Sullivan, ACT!’s founder.  Among his many contributions were the ID/Status field and Last Results field, marking a dynamic relationship between the salesperson, their prospects, and the database driving the process. 

When ACT! introduced the Opportunity with ACT! 4.0 Pat consulted with Dale Carnegie and Associates (now Dale Carnegie Training) to develop a sales process with 11 separate stages based on the DCT Sales Advantage methodology.  In recent years Sage ACT! added web integration to plug into social media, getting closer to prospects and customers.  As technology advances, so do the opportunities to adopt expanding philosphies.

There are hundreds of philosophies, all with inspiring authors and speakers, but their approaches are varied.  You may know:

• ·         Jeffrey Gittomer.  Little Red Book: 12.5 Principles of Selling
• ·         Seth Godin.  All Marketers are Liars and Purple Cow
• ·         John Jantsch. Duct Tape Marketing and Referral Engine
• ·         Sandler Training. The Sandler Rules
• ·         Catherine Kaputa. You are a Brand

Adhering to your philosophy of selling and marketing requires some introspection and planning.  Recognizing your streamlined process and the stages you pass through become steps in your own Sage ACT! opportunities.  

You may have several processes, one for sales and another for service, for example.  While using the samples that ship with Sage ACT! may work well for you, there are no limits to how you may modify the processes to follow strategies based on your preferred philosophy.

When you are beginning with a philosophy for sales and marketing and adapting it to your own strategy be careful to look at each stage as a gate through which each deal may pass.  A definitive stage is rarely a task (activity) completed by you, it is more likely your prospect’s response to the task and whether they have moved themselves into your next stage.

Also, the earliest stages may be based on your research (Qualifying, for instance) which requires only a modest amount of interaction with the prospect.

When you are done with your analysis of how you may best apply your sales and marketing philosophy to your database, then you roll up your sleeves and begin making the alterations to your database.  This may also be the time to contact us and get some help in this transformation.  

iCloud, Sage ACT! 2012, and Market Tectonics

Notes from a recent exchange with an ACT! user upgrading to Sage ACT! 2012.  The ACT! user states:
"Everybody has web access apps. For better integration on the go and with other applications,  I want the ACT contacts and appts on my PC to be pushed in realtime to my iDevice.  So they are always in sync without every having to raise a finger on all my computers (macbook, iPad, iPhone and PC running ACT)"

I might add that the most popular post on this blog, by far, is the one about publishing ACT! to the web and devices.   This behavior has been described as Ubiquity: put my stuff in ACT! from anywhere and have it show up everywhere.

Zip City's business model supports businesses that use ACT! for sales, marketing, and business intelligence.  How we have defined sales, marketing, and business intelligence has evolved deeply in the 16 years I have been an ACT! consultant.  I like to think of it as tectonic shifts in fundamental principles affecting markets.  Call it market tectonics.

Market tectonics prescribe shifts in demand that are not so subtle.  The vision you have of what ACT! should be is a rather new one that is nonetheless quite predictable.  The calculus Sage has to do in response to these demands includes a formula of how much you and millions of other ACT! users are willing to pay for the privilege of ubiquity.  Sage is in business to capitalize on our evolving understanding of What Is Possible.  ...and, now, what is possible is ubiquity.  When ACT! goes SaaS, as it will soon enough, this demand will be met.  Ubiquity will be part of the product offering from Sage by, say, Q3 2012.

Of course, there are more nimble players in the market now and there are solutions for the environment of ubiquity.  Today, Zip City could set you up with your entire desktop environment (ACT!, Office, Quickbooks, Swiftpage, et al.) in the cloud accessible form your every device.  Your business can have ubiquity for $50 - $90/month/user.  If a simple, moderate iPad/iPhone integration with a subset of data (contacts, activities, history, notes, opportunities) in a full blown app is what you seek, then you will be rewarded soon when we announce the app for $69.99.  It is still in beta as of this writing.

Technologies evolve and choosing how you access your information is part of technology’s promise.  Apple creates iCloud and a few months later ACT! users are wondering how they can leverage the concept to further their own environment.  Apple did not create a solution, though.  They created an environment for Apple solutions.  What iCloud apps are you using now?  iTunes, sure.  MobileMe? What else?  There isn’t much available yet.  It’s new.  Google and Amazon.  Same thing.  They are selling space and access to their proprietary devices, but no integration with popular applications that power business, like ACT!

The inevitability of ubiquity is a force of market tectonics.  It will not be long before applications we have used as desktop stalwarts become cloudified.  (Think Google Apps and Office 365.)  But what about applications like ACT! which are powerful (customizable) engines as desktop applications, in a way that the cloud cannot yet match?  We will see deeper integration with the cloud, certainly, but we will not see the power we know on our desktops today for some time.

Till then look for ubiquity to be offered in the form of virtual desktops and apps that sync in real time.  Because the market, You, demand ubiquity and because you are willing to pay for ubiquity, you will then see ACT! not only on your desktop, or as a web interface to your server, but you will also see it as a SaaS application hosted in the cloud and you will see, very soon, an app available on your iDevice.

The plates keep shifting and we are on top of it.

If you are in need of ubiquity today, then give me a call.

bevan wistar
ACT! Certified Consultant
Zip City
503-381-5654
bwistar at zip-city dot com

Holiday Marketing with Sage ACT! 2012

Use the holiday season to let your prospects and customers know that you are thinking of them personally.

Now is the time to make sure your prospects and customers know they are on your mind.  If you count the number of times you “touch” your base with some type of communication, remember the next few months are a welcomed time to reach out for no other reason than to let them know how much they mean to you.

Using Sage ACT! allows you to make the process easier by helping you to find them, and their addresses, quickly.  The features within Sage ACT! best-suited for the task at hand are described below.

Creating Your List
There are multiple ways to identify who to send your holiday email or card to within Sage ACT!.

Lookup by Opportunities Won.  Find the contacts with whom you have done the most business this year.  Look for the top opportunities Closed Won within the custom date range most relevant to your need.  Select all the opportunities on the list, right-click the selected, and choose Create Lookup.


Lookup by Contact Activity. Also consider a Lookup from your Contact records using the Contact Activity from the Lookup menu, selecting your preferred date range and contact types from the available filter.



Define Fields. Analyze your business and evaluate the processes you use to close business.  Does your existing database include all the ways you would categorize your contacts?  ID/Status and Referred By may not be enough. 

Consider adding a field like Role to describe whether a contact is a "Decision Maker", an "Advocate", a "Gatekeeper", or a "Speedbump", something we would not find on their business card, but should be right next to their Title field on your ACT! layout.


Sending
Sage Email Marketing for ACT!  (SEMA)  Use your built-in broadcast email tool to send good wishes directly to your list’s inbox.  Make your own, or use one of the many handy templates in the library.  If you need a free account (limit of 50 per day) then use this link (prior to version 2010) or sign up right from your toolbar in ACT!  


Zip City will build your first template for you when you set up your new SEMA trial... for nothing.  Call 503-381-5654 to get your holiday message out now.

Export to Excel
Once you have selected your list of recipients customize your columns to show only the fields relevant to your mailing and then click on the Export to Excel button on your toolbar.  The resulting list will be configured exactly as you see it in Sage ACT! and can then be used to send to your third-party service provider.

Plan ahead and acknowledge your best contacts by offering them the best of the season, easily, with ACT!

Making Printing Labels a Snap!
Purchase a Dymo Labelwriter 450 model printer and integrate it with ACT! to make printing labels a snap! Call me to learn more or schedule a time to have me set it up for you.

Good design is good business.

Bevan Wistar
ACT! Certified Consultant
www.zip-city.com
bwistar@zip-city.com
503-381-5654

Not Everything is a Contact in Sage ACT! 2012

In B2B Sales, Not Everything is a Contact.

Managing the complexities of multiple relationships by putting our data where it belongs.

As we consider the singular focus required in our efforts to ensure our prospects and customers feel a personal level of service we must also consider the nature of the information we accumulate on their behalf. Of particular concern is that we keep the information we collect available and discoverable when our primary relationship expands to other contacts in our database. What may be true for our primary contact may also be true for related, subsequent contacts when we are focusing on the larger picture, or an opportunity that involves multiple parties.

Here we will take a look at our own database for signs we are trying to do too much with one entity and ways to transition that information into more appropriate entities that will work harder for us and for our prospects and customers. 



Contact fields that will cause problems with our relationships. When we are tracking what might be considered Company-level information against the contact, every new contact we add to the database may then have different data that the primary contact. Keep that data on the Company Record. Examples:


·         ID/Status
·         Number of employees/beds/insured/users
·         Budget
·         Industry
·         Last product/policy/service purchased
·         Customer/Account Number


These are examples of data unique to the company for which our contact works, not the contact him- or herself.


How to fix it.  Company records can link fields to Contact records.  We need to collect information like the examples above when we are qualifying our prospect.  We wouldn’t create a Company record until there is another contact from that company added to our database.  Sage ACT! allows fields on the Contact record to be linked to the same fields on the Company record. 

When the field doesn’t exist on the Company record we would need to add it from Tools | Define Fields and link the new Company field to the original field on the Contact record.  When the field is changed on the Company record, as when the ID/Status field is changed from “Prospect” to “Customer”, we will be prompted to update the linked information to all linked contact records.

An added benefit to working with the Company record is that it consolidates all the conversations we have had with all contacts at that company with all the ACT! users on our team on the History tab.  We also see aggregated views of all Notes, Activities, and Opportunities, giving us deep insight into the value of the relationship unavailable on the multiple Contact records alone.

Can all the companies be created at once?  Yes.  With all the linked fields and contacts associated, too.  (One of our favorite add-on solutions for this task comes from Egen Consulting, Company Wizard.)

Consider opportunity-based information.  Taking this concept forward, let’s ditch the deal-based data we might put on the Contact record and move over to Opportunities.  This entity is often overlooked, but it happens to be the center of our revenue focus.  Why bother?  If things like Insurance Policy data, as an example, are being managed on the Contact record then what happens to that good information when the renewal comes in a year later?  We have to overwrite perfectly good and worthwhile data in favor of the latest data.

One way to fix this is to move all our data over to the Opportunities record.  This way when a renewal (as an example) comes in the renewal will be an additional record against the Contact record (and the Company record), leaving us visibility into our sales history with our customer over the life of this customer.

Not everything is a contact.  Now we are tracking relevant data giving us better insight into our B2B relationships, and delivering better service to our prospects and customers.

If you would like help with a transformation like this one please respond to this email or give us a call.

Good design is good business.