Workflow - Support for CRM process

Today the term is widely used WorkFlow in business, it is becoming more common to see in organizations to automate their business processes, they find it important to see what the actual behavior of the procedures performed, and of course , to establish mechanisms to control and monitor them. It is precisely in this sense that they can focus WorkFlow systems in the organization. Here is a little the meaning of this term.

A workflow (workflow) is basically the study of the operational aspects of a process, ie how they are structured, as performed, what is the order in which they are run and how to do compliance monitoring tasks within the process. One application of this style automates the sequence of actions, activities or tasks used to implement a process, giving the possibility to track the status of each of the stages involved.

Within a CRM solution in most business processes has a high exchange of information between different actors (people, applications or services, processing of others, etc.).. Therefore, implementing a solution or workflow application for any module, whether sales, marketing or customer service would be useful for the organization, and no doubt greatly increase productivity.

In practice, it could make a workflow to perform the following activities:

A validation circuit: you could establish that conditions are required for the creation of new customers, we also define some validation for different types of activities with customers are calls, meetings, tasks, etc.Las tasks to be performed between different participants in a process: it is defined as activities involving each participant of their responsibilities within the process and if required, establish some order ejecución.Los deadlines to be met: The time set for each activity within a process. The modes of validation.

Also you can set up two working mechanisms, a procedural WorkFlow, which corresponds to known business processes of the company and that somehow are subject to established procedures, ie it becomes a fixed workflow. For example, launching a campaign to customers promoting some kind of promotion. Within this process (campaigns), there are tasks that are fixed in a certain way and always will be, for example, the invitation sent by email, shipping confirmation, scheduling activities with customers, and so on. To this fact is easy to see that there is a preset workflow and depends on the execution of each task.

On the other hand we find what is known as ad hoc Workflow, which is mainly based on a model of group work where protagonists involved in deciding where to direct the workflow, ie, the workflow is dynamic. Following the example of the marketing campaign, you could set up a workflow to manipulate the outcome of an activity of confirmation of attendance, which depending on the results in the use stage of the process, do one or other activity.

However, the success of a CRM solution depends largely on how well plants are the business processes that have the capacity to manage customer relationships and interaction that occurs between the different entities of the organization to manage information. Version 7.5 perfectly fits SalesLogixse and becomes the most appropriate tool to control this kind of thing. Create any workflow (workflow) associated with any system entity, such as accounts, contacts, tickets, campaigns, etc.. Finally what is going to get is the automation of activities and tasks defined in any process and with this tool you can manage each of the steps involved in the workflow definition.

It is worth noting that the Web version 7.5, SalesLogix integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio. Net, this provides greater flexibility when creating workflows, and interact with the functionality of the tool.

(This article was written by Andrés Garrido, Mind Development Engineer Andean CRM projects based on the use Sage SalesLogix platform).