CRM Basics

The basic steps to be completed in order to start up the CRM system include.

•      Importing customer and customer related information (notes, resale certificates, special pricing, documents) into the system

•      Importing contact and contact related information

•      Loading ShipTo Address  information

•      Validating the imported data

•      Updating your imported data to loading any missing required information

•      Setting up new record defaults for new customers, contact and shipping addresses

•      Setting up system security options for CRM related tasks

•      Configuring the CRM system

•      Testing on your imported data

•      Updating and validating your converted data prior to startup

•      Beginning operations.

The primary files or tables in the CRM area are

•      Company File  The Company file stores the customers and potential customers (prospects) in the system.  Each record in the Company file should have a unique account number and a unique name.  Each customer record stores a lot of different information about each customer.  Some of this information, such as payment terms, shipping terms, sales rep, and shipping method, point to data that is stored in Tables used by many different programs.  These tables (Terms, Shipvia, Sales Rep), should be loaded prior to you loading the customer file.  Other data in the Company records, such as the customer credit limit, price level and other fields are used during order and invoice processing and will affect basic system behavior.

•      Contact File  The Contact file is used to store information about individuals (people) who may or may not be associated with a company in the company file.  Each Contact record contains a first and last name field, and a company field.  Each contact must point to a record in the company file.  If the contact is associated with an existing customer, the company field in the contact record is loaded with the name of the customer from the Company file.  If the contact is not assigned to a customer, the company field in the contact record is loaded with Unassigned Company (a special company record used to keep track of unassigned contacts).  Each contact record also stores a unique contact number.  This contact number should be loaded in all imported records and is automatically assigned (using a system counter) to new contact records.  You do not have to have contact information in the system to start operations – contacts can be created on the fly as required during transaction processing.

•      ShipTo The ShipTo file stores the individual shipping addresses that are used by each of your customers, plus some internal shipping addresses such as your warehouse locations.  Each ShipTo Address record contains an Account field that should point to a record in the Company file and a ShipTo ID field that should be loaded with a unique number.  The Shipto ID field is automatically loaded in new records based on a system counter.  The  ShipTo records also contain company name, address, and store# fields, and information that is used for sales tax and VAT processing purposes.

 Once the basic CRM information has been loaded into the system, and you have validated the data (made sure all required fields are loaded with valid data), you may also import other customer related data.  Other customer related data that is often imported into StreamV includes 

•      Comments  The Comment file stores text information that is associated with customer, contact, and shipto information.  Multiple comments can be maintained for each customer and contact.  This comment information can be used for both internal and external processing.  You can maintain internal comments to log sales, contact, and collections activity, and can maintain customer specific notes that are automatically printed on shipping documents and picking lists.  Each ShipTo record can be assigned a shipping note (automatically displayed in order entry and printed on shipping docs) and a ShipTo comment – which is an internal note about the address record.

•      Crossref  The Cross Reference file allows you to store  Customer specific inventory item information.  This cross ref information allows customers to place orders using their customer specific item numbers and enables operators or the system to determine the correct internal item number (customer item xyz = house item AP2010).

•      Images  Documents such as resale certificates, credit apps, contracts, images, specifications are stored on disk and pointed to by records in the Images file.   The imaging system and other files (such as Loncode) allow you to link documents, images, and other files to the customer records in the Company file.

More:

CRM Startup Checklist