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How to design this process?

 
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The user says we need to capture all the customers from
the database who hadn't had any sales records in the past 6 months.
So that they will be followed up.
Now the user asks how to cater for situations when these follow ups are fulfilled/dealt with whatever
Can they be reflected back into the application?

The question is this, if I export those customers who didn't make any purchase
in the past 6 months to Excel, and after they finish handling them,
they import these values back into my CRM. Probably other operators would have
entered a new sales record for one of those "no show" customer already in between these times,
which brings the management into a confused state.

Second Scenario is to let them have a check box in each row for these
"sparse" purchasing customers, when it is done, they check the checkbox of that row.
But I really want to go for batch mode, which doesn't seem to be a good consistent method at all by human
factor.

Any opinions or advices are welcome!
Thanks
Jack
 
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Jacky Luk wrote:Second Scenario is to let them have a check box in each row for these
"sparse" purchasing customers, when it is done, they check the checkbox of that row.
But I really want to go for batch mode, which doesn't seem to be a good consistent method at all by human
factor.



Your intuition about "batch mode" not being the correct approach in this case seems to me to be a good intuition. What's going to be involved in this follow-up? My guess: the sales person will at some point in time call the customer and inquire about why they haven't been buying anything lately, and then try to persuade them to start buying again. I can tell you from experience that sales people don't like doing that, so it might not get done right away. (At one place where I worked, new hires were given a list of such customers and told to cold-call them and try to get new business out of them.) At any rate it's going to be a time-consuming process so you aren't going to have a lot of "Follow-up Completed" transactions. So yes, updating the "Follow-up Completed" flag (or date, or whatever) should probably be done one flag at a time.

(Of course I don't know all about your application, so I might be wrong. Perhaps you have a boiler room full of people calling ex-customers, for example.)

And yes, your system should allow for the situation where the sales person is told to follow up on a customer, but by the time the follow-up happens (or is recorded) the customer has placed a new order. If your current design results in a confused state when that happens, then I would say the design needs to be changed.
 
Jacky Luk
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So Paul, in conclusion, you think the three-phase approach be more appropriate.
1) Export out the customers to Excel
2) Contact the customers (As far as I know, they will do something like that)
3) Import back into my CRM.

Mandatory:
Allows customer to place new orders during the process.
(Should I tell the client to print out a daily catalog of those customers when they come on duty in each morning?)
(Or pop out a message box at specified times, or when the application is started?)
Thanks
Jack
 
Paul Clapham
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Jacky Luk wrote:(Should I tell the client to print out a daily catalog of those customers when they come on duty in each morning?)



I expect the sales person would need to have current information available before they call one of those customers, yes. It could be embarrassing otherwise. Whether that involves printouts or lookups via web application or whatever would depend on how your application works.
 
Jacky Luk
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The most challenging task is the CRM has to "tell" the sales person about it in real time.


Will this work, assuming no intranet connectivity
Just consider a simple use case first:
1) User of CRM (on duty) exports no show customers
2) Sales person start follow ups
3) POS (off work) enters sales info into CRM
4) Unfollowed customers are imported back into CRM

Thanks
Jack
 
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