Why Is Excel Used As A CRM By Many Companies?

Yes it’s true – Microsoft Excel is a genius tool for many purposes of everyday business work. Starting from quick calculations up to complex lists with various formatting rules it seems as if nearly everything can be done with it. People got used to it over the years and learned the ins and outs. Whenever a new task arises that needs to be solved with a PC you automatically think about how it could be done in Excel.

That’s where the problem starts: Because we know how to use Excel and we have started it so many times before, we tend to leave out the question for an alternative to it. Is that program really the right thing to manage your customers? What do you do if you want to edit the list on the way? You take a copy of the list (if you knew that you will need it – otherwise you can only create a plain new file) and make your changes. If two or more people do this it gets really hard to merge all the new data to back to the original.

Now let us have look at the major improvements that CRM software will bring to our everyday workflow. With a CRM it is possible to make assignments between appointments and contacts. This way you get a journal that can be looked up by co-workers. Now everyone can check what has been done with a customer before. Since professional CRM applications are network enabled and can handle multiple users, it is possible to manage user restrictions as well. Not everyone needs to have access to your VIP customers.

There are even many more advantages you gain by using CRM software. You can place calls to your customers directly from the program. Write emails to one of them or you may even create large lists of recipients filtered by certain criteria. It is also easy to print out a subset of items using a special formatting or searching for items with easy filter and grouping functions. Truly professional CRM applications with multiuser support offer many more useful functions like instant messaging with your team members or automated creation of contact items by parsing your emails.

With all this in mind the natural question is: Why do so many companies still don’t use CRM software? The answer is that people are afraid of new technologies and they don’t have the time to learn the ropes. To overcome these issues you need to find good software that not only has all the features you need but also offers an intuitive user interface and is easy to use. Installation and configuration also needs to be as simple as possible so that the average computer user can handle it.

Gerard Schwabe is lead tech developer at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of team management software Pimero.