Using Workflows in CRM

A workflow is a term used to describe a set of tasks or steps for a business process. Though we often don’t realize it, we all use workflows in our daily lives. 

Another one that’s more in line with a business environment is “send an alert to the IT person when a critical piece of hardware doesn’t respond for 2 minutes.”

Workflows are put in place primarily for two reasons: consistency and completeness.

Consistency means all of your users follow the same process every time when some event happens. Completeness means that no steps are forgotten during the process.

To get your mind thinking about workflows you can include in your instance of Sugar, here are some examples of ones you can implemented in our your CRM installation:

• When a customer’s support case changes its status, notify the customer contact by sending an email alert that includes both the old and the new status
• If the Priority field on the support case is set to “P1”, the highest priority, send an email alert to management
• Whenever a case is closed, notify the Knowledge Base author, who evaluates the resolution to see if there is material for a KB article

Other areas of CRM can benefit from workflows as well. What about setting a task for the sales operations person to review the opportunity when it reaches the Contract stage, to ensure that all of the pieces are in place to close the deal smoothly?
You can also create time-based workflows that are invoked when something doesn’t happen after a period of time. An example of this would be to send an alert to an employee when the status of a task hasn’t changed for a week.

Think of workflow as a gentle reminder that something might need some attention.

To put workflows into practical use in your installation, take a look at the steps your CRM users are doing on a regular basis. Map out your business processes, and find the ones that make sense to incorporate into your CRM system.

Talk to your “power users” about what best practices they use to consistently win deals, then build the best processes into your CRM application so all your users can follow these good ideas. Let the workflows do the work for you, and you’ll have a better, more consistent, more repeatable process in the end.