Customer Manager Blog

Think about status updates and comments on Facebook.  Tweets with Twitter. SMS txt messaging on your mobile phone.  All of these features have changed the way people use technology, and really… at the end of the day they are just ways of sending or viewing a brief sentence or two. We are learning that the Notes feature in Customer Manager is our version of this, providing huge amounts of value to the businesses using it.

Why?  Because they are flexible and allow you to track exactly what is important about your customer… capture whatever you need for your business to succeed and for you and fellow employees to provide great service.   All it takes is a few key strokes, less than an email (proper Grammar optional, kind of like my Blog posts).

Simple status messages can tell you what your friends are thinking, feeling or doing on social networking sites.  Simple one sentence Notes like personal attributes, phone call messages, interests or past work can give you immediate insight to impress your customer with amazing service (perhaps even talking to them months later than the first interaction).   

This simple little feature can seriously help produce repeat business. Check out an example of how we have seen some businesses use Customer Manager. In this case Lisa is a repeat customer, the whole office knows her husband’s name, what they have done for them in the past and what might be the next service she is interested in.  Just three sentences ( more than a dozen less than this post).

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You may have noticed a new feature recently added to Customer Manager Online - Past Due Balance.  Past Due joins Open Balance and Total Revenue in the QuickBooks Snapshot, for customers who set up sync with QuickBooks 2009.

QuickBooks Snapshot

These three key financial indicators give quick insight into customers’ financial standing, so you can provide better service to customers.  In conversations with Customer Manager Online users the QuickBooks snapshot has been a hit.  Here’s what I’ve heard:

• With Total Revenue, users can tell who their best customers are and can reward them. To try this in Customer Manager Online, simply go to your contact list, filter the list by customers, and sort the Total Revenue column.  You can quickly see your top customers!
• With Past Due, users can quickly see customers overdue on a payment and can contact those customers. To try this, go to your contact list, filter by customers, and sort the Past Due Balance column.
• With Open Balance, you can easily find customers that owe you money (but who aren’t overdue). To try this, go to your contact list, filter by customers, and sort by the Open Balance column.

How are you using the QuickBooks Snapshot feature in Customer Manager Online?  Is this useful for your business?

Quick tips:

• To filter your list to only show customers, go to the contact list, then, under Contact Type on the left hand side, click Customer.
• To sort your list, click the column header of the column you want to sort by
• To show or hide columns from the contact list, change the view by clicking the Show/Hide Columns button in the upper right of the list

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We’ve heard from many Customer Manager Online users that you want to track “new business possibilities,” “leads,” “new business contacts,” — and other terms for tracking potential customers differently than ones you have already serviced. We are researching good ways to make this drop dead simple… but there are already some pretty easy ways to do it with Customer Manager Online today.

In the current release, you can create a custom field to track this information and then see the complete list of your contacts who you think will get you new business (even if they are ones you’ve done business with before).

Here is one way to do it:

1.  Create a custom field with a check box of “Lead,” then mark all contacts that you consider a good candidate for future business with a check mark

2.  You can also create a custom field that is a text box  to enter in what you think you could be selling to this customer

3.  Then you can filter the list by selecting the name of the custom field in the Filter List - the checklist of leads - and/or the list of potential sales to those leads

In both cases, don’t forget you can use the notes section to track your interaction with a prospective customer - or customers you’re getting return business from. You and others in the office will know all the important details about a customer when you are working on getting their business.

Have you found another way to track leads?  Let us know.  How can we make this even easier?  Let us know.

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One of the goals of Customer Manager Online is to organize your most important customer data all in one place, so answers are at your fingertips. To make it even easier to find customer information quickly, the team added the Quick Search bar to each page, so you can instantly locate customers based on any piece of contact information.

Quick Search

Simply type in any piece of contact information into the search bar - name, phone number, even information you’ve included in custom fields! Even if you only remember part of the information, the system will narrow the results based on what you remember.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

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Custom Fields allow you and the people in your business to track all the really important information about your customers. We’ve seen some great use of this feature, but some people haven’t quite found it yet.

Here are some of the ways we are seeing Small Businesses use this feature to customize Customer Manager Online for their needs.

I talked to a pool service company who is using Custom Fields to track the last time they replaced a pool filter, how much chemicals the pool requires, and date their customer signed up for the service (among other things).

Another business (a shuttle service) is using Custom Fields to track preferences of their customers. In this case the business was tracking beverage of choice, frequent destinations and general method of payment (among others of course).

How have you customized Customer Manager Online and what information are you tracking that helps you better serve your customers and get you new business in the future? Let us know, and tell us how to improve the feature.

Here is a quick overview of how to get started using Custom Fields (check out the pictures if that helps).

1. Go to the Contact List and select “Manage Custom Info”

2. Now you can add and create your Custom Fields

a. Enter the text you wish everyone to see

b. Enter the type of information you want to capture (there are 4, Text, Numbers, Dates or a Check Box)

3. Go to a customer contact view, select Edit, then enter in the Customer Field information important for that customer.

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Do you know how easy it is to get back to Customer Manager Online? Once you sign up for the application, you can sign back into the application a couple of ways:

• Bookmark the site address: https://customermanager.intuit.com/cmo/
• Go to the Customer Manager Online website, click the Sign In button
• In QuickBooks 2009*, click on the Customer Manager Online access points (hint: there are two in the Customer Center!), then click the Sign In button

* The access points in QuickBooks only appear in QuickBooks 2009 R2 or later. If you don’t see them in your 2009 product, try running your QuickBooks Updates.

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