Every day, you deal with numerous files that are either stored on a computer or a physical location. Have you ever faced a situation where you searched for a file and you were unable to find it when you needed it the most or you lost that file completely? We’re introducing a new way to store and retrieve your files – a file storage service from melssCRM that allows you tag a file to a particular item and retrieve it from there.

Files related to a particular item can be stored along with it and in turn this helps your organize your files better. Moreover this gives you agility and flexibility of having the access to all your files through the Internet, from any computer and most important – on the move.

Copies of all important customer communication records likes requirements specifications documents, quotations, invoices, customer purchase orders, job cards, price lists, brochures, marketing collateral, service reports, complaint reports, etc all these can be stored in the CRM.

We’re looking forward to seeing how useful this feature will be to you in the days to come.

Check out our previous blog on how you can Work As A Team To Resolve Customer Complaints.

If you would like to keep yourself informed on the latest features and updates, you can subscribe to melssCRM Blog through email.

TEAM – Together Everyone Achieves More

Customers are very demanding when it comes to customer support. In most instances they are likely facing some problem with your product/service and want it rectified as soon as possible.

As an organization when you extend your support to the customers, the concerned people from the support team or the department are expected to know about the problems and respond back when ever your customers seek help from you.

Support can determine how well is your relationship with your customers. A standard email practice is to keep all the concerned people on a Carbon Copy (CC).

Now how do you replicate this inside a CRM? We have now come up with a feature that will allow you to Set Tracking for multiple people.

Once the tracking is enabled whenever you make a change to that case, all team members for whom tracking is enabled will get an email alert. This will help you work as a team and be updated on customer issues and resolve them as a team.

And as Vince Lombardi says “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”.

When you customer support department works as a team, you can bring a smiles to more customers.

Related Article:

Can I “Track This” Case?

Marketing is a key business function which helps in improving the sales and conversion rates. As a marketing activity getting a bulk database of Leads is simple and can be collected from various sources. However, the difficult part is to re-assign leads to different people and make sure they are effectively following up with the allocated leads.

As a person higher up in the organization’s hierarchy, when you want to know how your sub-ordinates are following up with the leads, you probably ask for a report. Having identified the pressing need, we have now added a dashboard widget to help you identify how many activities are done on leads, allocated to different people.

Now that you have found the overall status, you would like to find how many leads have been confirmed. You can do that by clicking on the settings icon on top-right corner of the widget and select/de-select the lead statuses. By doing this you can get a conscise picture of how your sub-ordinates are following up on leads.

Now you can effectively follow-up with your leads and also ensure that your sub-ordinates are doing a good job of follow-up, with the new addition to the range of widgets in melssCRM dashboard.

Related Article:

I don’t know how to add a Widget!

In one of our previous posts on Custom Fields, we had informed you on how you can add four different types of custom fields. After adding this feature, it has helped a lot of our customers to customize their CRM account according to their business requirement. However, we have been receiving requests to include a new type of custom field.

Recently we have added a new custom field – Text Area. This field will allow you to add multiple lines of text without having to worry about the viewability of the text. Be it your Quotation text or an extra product description, you can add the Text Area Custom Field to any module and personalize your CRM account to suit your needs.

How do you like this enhanced customization option with custom fields? Please feel free to drop in a line.

Related Article:

How do I add Custom Fields?

In earlier days when technology was in its budding stages, there were solutions that were rigid and modifying them required a lot of time and effort. Many times even after putting lot of efforts, some features were not customizable at all. However as businesses evolved over time, the need for making flexible solutions became imperative.

Each business is unique and it has its own requirements. It can be anything like adding new fields, removing fields, re-positioning fields, adding new sections, deleting sections, setting some custom fields as mandatory and so on.

To cater to these requirements, we have now developed better capabilities to customize the screen layout and fields.

The standard Leads screen layout in melssCRM looks like this.

Now let us see how to customize the Leads page layout according to your business’ requirement.

You can drag & drop the necessary fields to the Leads screen layout, in the desired section and remove some unnecessary fields. Also you can create/delete sections and organize the fields in different sections according to your requirement. However you cannot remove melssCRM defined mandatory fields.

After you finish customizing your Leads page layout, you can click on save layout and then publish it.

The all new Leads screen layout, customized exquisitely for your organization may look like this.

We believe that the page layout customization will increase the usability of the CRM and also help you do your work better.

What do you think about this whole new feature of customizing your own layout? Have you tried it yet?

Note:

This feature is currently available only for Leads.

Related Article:

Can I customize the Leads page layout?

Price is a complex entity. It depends on a lot of factors and can change anytime. Price may vary based on currency, location, season, quantity, market situation, or simply to close a deal. All these factors may not apply every time, but a business needs to be flexible enough to accommodate these variable factors.

Manually managing these variable factors can be really tedious and can slow down the rate at which you work. Customers do not have the time until you work out a quotation, they want to know the price instantly. The time you take to provide a Quote to the customer can be the difference between winning the deal or losing it.

After listening to our customer feedback and analyzing them, we have come up with a new feature Price Books. A Price book lets you fix the price for multiple products and for multiple quantity ranges.

The unique feature about melssCRM price books is that you can create a price book based on a specific currency. This actually means, say if you deal with N products and with M currencies, you can create NxM price books; giving you complete control over currency, purpose, season, quantity or for that matter any intangible entity that governs the price of your products.

If you take a close look at the above screenshot, we allow you to identify a price book by its name. This way, you can name it based on location, season,  or purpose.

Below that you will have to specify the currency in which you are going to create the price book. This way you ensure that there is no ambiguity in providing a Quote to customers.

The From Range and To Range allow you to specify the quantity and the Discount allows you to specify discount percentage. This helps you deal with multiple quantities.

Finally when you choose the products for which you are creating this price book, the Unit price (Cost Price) is populated by default (if you have entered it in the Unit Price field provided in the products module). You can specify the price according to your requirement and save the price book.

If you would like to find out how you can create a price book? Read on…

Related Article:

How do I add a new Price Book?

Selling is fulfilling experience when you know that you are making a lot of profit. A LOT of profit? Until you know the exact numbers that signify “LOT”, you are never sure how much profit did you make. And when you sell a range of products, keeping track of your profits is very difficult because every product will have different cost price and selling price.

If you belong to the Business-to-Business (B2B) space, knowing the cost price while preparing quotations is a must. You can never afford to quote below your cost price.

We have recently added an enhancement to allow you to capture the cost price and selling price within melssCRM. You can capture the cost price in Unit Price field and selling price in List Price field.

In Opportunites, Quotes and Invoices you will see a new List Price field next to the Unit Price field.

By default the Unit Price will be populated in the List Price field. Previously, Unit Price was editable. After this enhancement, you will not be able to edit the Unit Price in Opportunities, Quotes or Invoices. However, you can dynamically edit the List Price according to your requirement.

From now on you can always be sure of the cost price and be aware of how much profit you are making with every deal.

How did you like our enhancement? If you have any suggestions, do drop in a line.

Leads are the list of prospective customers that you generate to keep the sales funnel filled with opportunities. The more the number of leads, the better for your organization. As you generate leads from different sources, you simply maintain them as a list without working on them properly. Over a period of time it becomes difficult for you to organize and allocate different people to work on them independently.

We had this interesting requirement from one of our customers, who were working on thousands of leads day-in-day-out. They found it difficult to assign different people to work on different group of leads independently. Based on their feedback, we came up with the Bulk re-assign Leads feature for melssCRM.

Now you can filter the leads by any field in the leads screen and re-assign it to different people in your organizaion. You can find this feature in the Leads listing screen under the Tools->Bulk re-assign Leads.

After some recent usability, shortcuts, customization and branding updates to melssCRM, its time we focus back onto security.

IT Security is one of the major concerns when it comes to business. The “I” in IT represents Information and it is very critical. Many businesses do invest in IT security, but they are never sure of how much should they invest in it. Since business data is an intangible asset (though it can be quantified after a through analysis), going for the best security measures available makes perfect sense.

There are numerous security issues that a general user is not aware of and can accidentally be a threat to the organization’s security. As the saying goes, “Prevention is better than cure” – it is always better to take proactive measure to ensure the security of your organization.

We have recently introduced two new security updates – IP Security and Identity Confirmation.

IP Security

By using IP Security you can control the access over an IP Address range. This prevents intrusion from unauthorized people trying to access your account from different parts of the world.

Identity Confirmation

The best possible security measure you can take is to authorize is to grant access based on PC to PC (applies to Notebook, Netbooks, etc.). Authorize specific computers to be able to access your account and forget about unauthorized users trying to access your login ever again.

Related Articles:

What is IP Security?

What is Identity Confirmation?

We have been working on giving you more personalized services for melssCRM. In our previous post, Your Logo on melssCRM we wrote on how you can include your organization’s logo within melssCRM. Now we are taking personalization to the next level by allowing you to Rename Tabs.

Management theories on Organizational Structure may suggest that organizations work on Account based reporting or Product based reporting structure. However in real world when you do business with people, you know that they are your customers.

You are more comfortable calling them your customers, rather than Accounts. And as a general rule the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “Account” is a Bank account.

Definitely, Bank account does not psychologically sum up to Customers.

Now we have launched a new feature that will enable you to Rename the tabs. All you have to do is, go to the Rename Tabs settings in your Admin Settings and rename the tabs as you wish.

Ensure that you give the plural and singular forms of the same word in Tab Name and Command Name text boxes respectively.

Logout and login again, and there you go – You call your Customers – Customers now.

If you feel that this feature will help you avoid a lot of confusion and make you feel happy, do drop in a line.

Note:

Administration permissions need to be enabled to rename tabs.

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Can I Rename the tab headings?

How can I set User’s access rights/User Permissions?