Keep track of projects and improve customer service

Andrew Brook-Holmes, Office Product Manager, Microsoft UK Andrew Brook-Holmes is an Office Product Manager at Microsoft UK, with 25 years’ experience working in IT, of which 10 years have been with Microsoft. He is also a director at the South East Media Network, a South East England Development Agency-backed business providing strategic focus for the region’s digital content sector.

Question: In order to be as paperless as possible, our five employees use Office Outlook as our customer information folder. Alongside customer contact details, we enter all the details of projects sent to us in the form of PDFs by our main supplier of work. We then add our spreadsheets, call logs, photos, copies of communications, scanned reports such as electrical certificates, and so forth. Can you advise us if this method is capable of holding all this information long-term, or will it one day overload and stop working? - Sarah, Bristol

Answer: Hi Sarah. Whilst you’ve obviously got by so far using Outlook as the repository for your customer records, I’d have to say it wasn’t designed specifically for this purpose. Although it can certainly be used to send, receive and store documents prior to saving them in other workflow systems, Outlook is designed mainly to help individuals manage their email, contacts, calendars and tasks.

As things stand, if one of you is out of the office for the day or away on holiday, it could mean that twenty per cent of your company information isn’t available to the other four members of your team. I’d therefore suggest that Outlook is perhaps not the most appropriate place to store the project information you receive in the longer-term.

I believe what you really need is some form of centralised system or shared folder on your server to which you and your colleagues can transfer incoming documents for reference, processing and sharing by everyone at any time.

Sharing documents with your team
A cost-effective solution I’d like to propose to you involves the combination of two Microsoft products that work hand in hand with Outlook and which are better suited to storing and sharing client documents once you’ve received them. These are Business Contact Manager (BCM) and Windows SharePoint Services.

Let me tell you first about BCM, which is available as a special edition of Office Outlook 2007. BCM will allow you to save the project information you receive from your supplier in a more robust and synchronised database of customers, together with their communication history. You’ll also be able to use it to:

A fitting solution
One of our customers, Ramsbottom Kitchens, had a situation not too dissimilar to yours. With nine kitchen installations a week, their challenge was how to coordinate everyone’s work and make sure the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. If a customer rang into the showroom and the person dealing with the customer was away or on holiday, the rest of the team couldn’t answer the question. You can read their case study here.

Having installed Outlook with BCM, they can now enter all new orders into the system, including customer contact details and each fitter’s schedule. It means everyone can now use the system whenever they talk to a customer, then update contact history accordingly.

BCM also enabled them to set up shared calendars to replace paper diaries. Now whenever a customer calls the showroom to book or change an appointment, office staff can automatically update the diary. Sales people’s calendars are stored on their laptops and updated automatically each time they return to base. Now whenever customers call, their information is readily available, so whoever answers can see exactly what’s going on and respond without having to ring them back.

Delighting your customers
From a TLC perspective, BCM is also a great tool for helping you to exceed customers’ expectations, because as well as alerting you to ‘due by’ dates for things you’ve promised them, it can store personal details and remind you to send them a greeting on their birthday, which is always nice touch that’s guaranteed to impress them.

BCM also allows you to use your laptop or mobile phone to double check recent activity on any given project en route to a client’s premises. It means you’ll be well briefed before going through the door and ensure you don’t get blind-sided by anything unexpected.

In short, BCM really helps you keep on top of your game thanks to in-built workflow, actions and reminders against each activity, thereby ensuring that all your contacts are treated as valued customers. But let’s get back to your immediate need to manage those all-important client instructions.

Affordable content management
Now that you’ve captured the PDFs and other documents sent by your customers as email via Outlook with BCM, you can then save this information to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and use BCM to provide links to that content in your project activity. In other words, you can use BCM as a vehicle for transferring inbound documentation from customers to a central and more accessible resource.

The good news is that because it’s a component of Windows Server, WSS is a very affordable enterprise content management solution. It means that if you’ve already purchased client access licences (CALs) for Windows Server, then you are automatically entitled to use WSS.

WSS makes it easy to share and archive documents and keep track of tasks by acting as a single workspace for you and your colleagues to access and update documents - both in the office and online. It will allow everyone in your team to edit and manage documents, view previous revisions and set document-specific security.

What’s more, using Outlook, you can access the information stored in WSS anywhere, anytime. This means you can connect WSS calendars, documents, contacts, or tasks with Outlook and have full editing capabilities, secure in the knowledge that any changes you make to the information stored in Outlook will be reflected in the server version.

WSS will also alert you when actions are required or when changes are made to documents. It also provides offline synchronisation through Outlook 2007, which you can use to manage document libraries, lists, calendars, contacts and tasks, then synchronise the changes you’ve made when you’re able to reconnect to the network.

At the end of the day, this combination of Outlook, BCM and WSS should not only remove your fears about future capacity, but also make your inbound documentation more readily available to your whole team, regardless of whether they are in the office or not.

I hope this helps, but if you require further help I suggest you contact your nearest Microsoft Small Business Specialist who will be able to give you more advice.

--Andrew

Related Links

Business Contact Manager

Windows SharePoint Services

Licensing for Windows SharePoint Services

Microsoft Small Business Specialist