Routine CRM Maintenance Tips - Part 1

crm maintenance systems Apr 17, 2023

Your car will not continue to perform as designed without routine maintenance. Oil & filter changes, tire rotation & brake pads, car washes & tune-ups are necessary to keep it running smoothly and avoid costly fixes down the road. Your Vast Action CRM is much the same.

A CRM is a tool to help keep your business running smoothly, and doing routine maintenance tasks will optimize its performance. But neglecting it can result in missed opportunities to optimize marketing and time-consuming clean-up efforts in the future.

If your CRM isn’t on a routine maintenance schedule, there’s unrealized potential there waiting for you. A simple CRM maintenance schedule can save you time and money over the course of a year – and we all know time IS money.

1. It starts with a solid foundation. Get to know your system.

When you get a new car, you spend some time learning how to drive it and take care of it – from locating the cruise control to setting up the Bluetooth, you take the time to figure out all the bells and whistles that will make driving most comfortable and convenient.

Do you know all that your CRM can do for you? If you’re using it minimally as just an email platform, you’re probably missing out on much of its functionality.

Much like you can tune in to YouTube and watch a video to learn how to refill your washer fluid or even change your own brake pads, there many Vast Action CRM training videos available to teach you how to utilize the different functions within your CRM. (To find these videos, log into your CRM, select your name in the top right corner, then select “help”.)

2. Getting Help from a CRM Support Staff Member

You can also schedule a CRM walk-through call with a member of our team for a one-on-one overview. Start with the basics, and as your business grows, you can continue to customize your system in ways that work best for your business.

3. A Few Pro Tips for Contact Info in your CRM

First things first: When uploading lists or adding contacts manually, make sure they don’t already exist in the CRM (otherwise you’ll create duplicate accounts). Also, take the time to make sure every one is carefully entered and clearly labeled in your spreadsheet or manually during account creation. When using the CRM for print or email marketing, merge fields are available to personalize the marketing per client. Use correct capitalization and be careful with spacing and spelling to maintain that professional appearance in your marketing. We don’t recommend using all caps, either.

How you enter names and addresses in the system is how that data will appear when merging into an email or printing postcards, letters, or mailing labels. Take care to label all your contacts as prospects or customers, at the very least.

If your business includes residential, realtor, and business gift clients, make sure to label your contacts by these types. Additionally, we strongly recommend labeling phone numbers as cell phones or landlines to help you know how best to reach your customers, making it faster and easier to create text lists.

What might a sample CRM maintenance schedule look like after your initial list upload?

Weekly:

Globally update type and status for all new customers that feed into your CRM directly from VectorConnect using order types in the query function (or manually from memory).
Label phone lines for new customers as mobile or landline.
Add any notes you took after your interactions with customers at shows or during calls.
Verify & update any new contact information for past customers who made a new purchase or stopped by your booth and filled out a drawing ticket or service request.
Leave a history note any time you have an interaction or make a change to a customer’s CRM page so that you have a timeline of your history with each person or couple.

Monthly:

Add tags to customer contact pages for the events they attended.
Update Last Service Date for any customers who received service.
Update phone extensions with “TOO” (text opt out) for any customers who opt out of receiving text messages.
Search your CRM for duplicate accounts and merge them.

As needed:

Change customer statuses to inactive if you receive word that they have died or no longer wish to be contacted by you.
For specific marketing type requests, add tags such as “Do not text” “Do not email” “Do not mail” “Do not call” “Do not contact” “Do not market to” based on their requests. This way, they can be excluded from particular marketing channels.
Search for customers who no longer have a valid phone number or email address on file and contact them with the contact information you do have to try get all contact info updated.

DIY or DFY

Do you have the time and know-how to perform vehicle maintenance yourself, or do you hire a professional? Maybe you enjoy taking it to the car wash and giving it a good detailed clean, but you prefer to have a professional do the real dirty work, like oil changes and tire rotation. Or maybe you’re super busy with other things that are important to you and outsource all vehicle maintenance.

Whether you maintain your CRM all on your own, you have a personal assistant or team, or you hire virtual professionals to handle most administrative work so that you can focus your time and energy on other aspects of your business, there are many ways to approach maintaining your CRM like a well-oiled machine.

Spending a little time now, or in your business’s slow season, to establish a system for maintaining customer data, following through with it, and auditing that system annually to assess how it’s working for you will save time and make communicating with your customers easier and more effective.

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