Entrepreneur.com has an article up on 5 Simple Ways to Show Customers You Care:

1. Share Your Knowledge
2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt
3. Reward Customers
4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event
5. Do Good

It's a great article and I recommend you check out. Here is my take on how you can apply these points to your own business.

1. Sharing Your Knowledge.  Social CRM is here.  As has always been the case, with it you can manage your e-mail newsletters.  You can now also manage your incoming and outgoing Social CRM communications with applications such as Twitter or Facebook.

2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt.  Without a CRM application, how will you be able to keep track of all of your correspondence with your customers.  Newer CRM packages have the ability to integrate with all forms of communications.  Fax, Email, Snail Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, etc.

3. Reward Customers.  With the proper CRM application you can track Campaigns where you use Coupons, Gifts, Events, Targeted Mailers, Phone Calls, Social Media, etc.

4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event.  Customer Appreciate Events or User Groups are a great way to keep your name in a customers mind.  With CRM you are able to invite your customers or potential customers to the events, track registrations and report on attendance and survey results.

5. Do Good.  Doing good is a great thing, but how will your customers know about it if you aren't able to track and effectively communicate your "good."

Using newer CRM products goes far beyond just a giant electronic Rolodex of names and phone numbers.  With a properly setup CRM application and trained user base, you should be able to manage your complete customer experience from prospect to repeat business.  And then some.

What if you want to be selective as to who gets to send Meetings and Phone Calls to their Outlook calendars? What if you want to send your To-Dos in SalesLogix over to Outlook, or how about, even better, your Contacts? May I introduce to you, Intellisync for SalesLogix. A word of warning, the setup for Intellisync happens on a user by user basis, and it can be quite time consuming if you are setting all of this up yourself. In order to keep this somewhat concise, I am going to bullet point out some of the finer points of Intellisync, as well as some precautionary advice:

• Intellisync will let you be selective with what you send to Outlook, and for whom. You can send Meetings, Phone Calls, To-Dos, and Contacts over to Outlook from SalesLogix once configured.

• Do not use Intellisync and Advanced Outlook Integration together, as it will cause duplicate activities to appear in your Outlook calendar. The exception here is that you may choose to not configure Appointments when setting up Intellisync (you could still configure To-Dos and Contacts).

• I recommend you set up Intellisync to only send from SalesLogix to Outlook, not the other way around. This is because if you want to schedule a Meeting in Outlook, it will send it to SalesLogix, but it will be missing a Contact and an Account, as well as some other key info...not good.

• Because we have been assuming that you are using SalesLogix 7.5 this whole time, I think it is worth mentioning that Intellisync behaves a little differently in the new version. You must deploy the Intellisync Web Portal regardless of whether or not you are using the SalesLogix WEB Client. You will run into this instantly when trying to set up your End Users with Intellisync, as the Intellisync installed locally on their machines asks for a URL in order to configure. When you make the decision that you would like to use Intellisync (or continue using it if you upgrade), the first thing you need to do is install the Application Architect (this is where you deploy the Intellisync portal) on a server that has IIS running. This is a BIG CHANGE that just happened with the latest upgrade, so beware!

I am going to leave it at that for now, although, I could go on for pages and pages about variations of Outlook Integration i.e. am I completely out of luck if I don't use Outlook? - (hint... you'd think so, as it is called Outlook Integration, but thankfully, you do have some other options), or what if I am using the WEB Client for SalesLogix. Perhaps I might address this in a future posting, however, if you just can't wait for that and need to implement a solution NOW, please feel free to contact us here at Technology Advisors. We want to help!

Many people ask me, ‘Brett, you teach the same SalesLogix classes over and over again, doesn't it get boring?' To their surprise, my answer is always ‘No!'. Why is that? Because whether it be an Administrator class, or a standard End User class, I am always on the receiving end of a steady stream of questions - some that I hear over and over, and can answer on the spot, and others that take time and research to answer. The latter is definitely my favorite.

One topic that leads to questions that often fit into the latter, and is never exceptionally easy to teach, is the Outlook Integration piece. There are a lot of options to choose from in order to set up Outlook Integration for you organization, and it is not uncommon for me to get some blank stares as I go through this section in training. Whether you've been using some form of Outlook Integration with SalesLogix for years, or you are brand new to this whole topic, you are bound to pick up something from all of this.

Let's start with the basics, shall we? Let's assume in this case, you have Outlook installed, and you are using the SalesLogix 7.5 LAN client...
First of all, if the install was done correctly, you should have the SalesLogix buttons in Outlook, which allow you to interact and save information in SalesLogix with a simple click. I am not going to go into a lot of detail here, but these are a slam dunk. They exist out of the box, and all you need to do is have Outlook installed and setup, and then install the SalesLogix client.

So... your email is covered. We can get relevant emails into SalesLogix very easily with those buttons. Of course, we want more though... we want activities to come over to our Outlook calendar. The most simplistic way to make this happen is to turn on Advanced Outlook Integration. What does this do, you ask? First of all, for the WHOLE ORGANIZATION (every SalesLogix user), meetings and phone calls scheduled in SalesLogix will zip right over to your Outlook calendar, and be shown there as Appointments. Important - meetings and phone calls only! Again, this is for EVERYONE, and there is no option to turn this off for some users. Make sure your users all understand what is happening before you turn this on! One more feature here, is that when scheduling a phone call or meeting, you will get another tab that will allow you the ability to pick out contacts, or other SalesLogix users and invite them via an Outlook invite. Be careful here, as whatever information you type into the notes will be included in this invite as well!

More advanced than Advanced Outlook Integration to come...