Following on from my earlier post about managing contacts and business links as a school, I had a meeting last week with our "Work Related Learning Coordinator" who manages (amongst other things) work placements for students. We had a good discussion about both our requirements for a perfect system and the non-technical work flow problems involved in getting such a system to be widely and effectively used in school, since we felt that the key to it was getting staff to record when people come in and work with us so when we ring up we can say "I know you helped us out last Autumn with...." rather than a completely cold call. The best answer we came up with was for this to be managed at the reception desk, since all visitors pass through there and we couldn't really expect teaching staff to remember to update the details in Outlook.
We had a look at Sugar CRM, KeepM and Outlook, and the consensus was that a public folder in Outlook would be ideal. Since my last post, I'd found a great little article on customising Outlook contact forms (in this case, for estate agents, but it's applicable to any area). It looks as though I'll be able to set up exactly the fields we need (industry sector, for example). The only fly in the ointment at present is that I can't make the custom fields searchable. More playing required...
As an addendum, we both agreed that we needed some business cards for when we're out and about, so I'm going to get something made up and printed over at moo.com (which looks fabulous!).
No comments:
Post a Comment