Manage your Contacts, Activities, Projects and more with Bluesoft CIS
This is a more detailed view of CIS. For a general overview of how CIS can save your company time and money, and increase sales, please goto the CRM SOFTWARE page.
Overview
Business today requires comprehensive customer information management, but it is often impossible to find this
information when it is needed most. Staff may record details of contacts, telephone calls, upcoming tasks or potential
orders with a filofax, on post-it notes or in a personal database; if a member of staff is unavailable then the information
that they posses is hard to find.
The Bluesoft Client Information System helps you to store, view and analyse this
information centrally using desktop PCs - giving everybody in your organisation access to up to date, synchronised,
client information. Bluesoft will tailor CIS to the specific needs of your business. Completely new functional modules
can be added, and the existing standard modules can be tailored to suit your company's existing culture and business
processes.
What CIS Can Do for You
Contact Management features help keep accurate, accessible contact records, and increase productivity through
automated letters, faxes and emails.
Manage Your Sales Pipeline by tracking sales opportunities; aid decision-making by analysing current opportunities;
modify strategies in the light of past data.
Project Handling brings groups of Activities together for processing: produce invoices, track new business, organise
seminars and more.
Dynamic Navigation CIS navigation changes according to where you are, giving easy access to powerful functions.
Profile Fields Profile fields are user-definable fields, but unlike traditional contact management packages, these fields are truly relational. What this means is that any new profile field can contain any number of values. For example, you could create a new profile field called 'Current Car' to store the make and model of the car that your contacts drive. When the contact changes their car, the new entry does not overwrite the old entry, but is added to the top of the stack. At a glance the history of the contact's car ownership can be seen.
Contact Summary View at a glance everything you need to know about a contact including...
the date the contact was entered
the last 10 activities
static groups that the contact belongs to
dynamic groups that the contact belongs to
all profile field entries
all seminars attended or booked on
The summary is in the form of a tree view and each entry can be expanded to see further detail, such as who entered the data and a link to an associated document.
vCard Import vCards are a standard way of sending contact details, usually by email. vCards can be exported directly from Outlook and Outlook Express. Simply drag a vCard either from your own copy of Outlook, or from an email attachment onto CIS. The contact will be added straight away, but in keeping with the CIS 'clean data' approach, the contact company and address are all searched before in CIS before the import takes place. For example if an exact match of the company name is found in CIS that company is used. If similar companies are found then the user is asked to confirm whether this new company is indeed new, or whether an exisiting company should be used.
Similar Company Matching Many companies can be spelled in different ways. For example Bluesoft Ltd, Bluesoft Limited or Blue Soft could all relate to the same company. A traditional contact management package would allow all of these company names to be added with no questions asked. CIS on the other hand has an excellent algorithm for finding similar company names. If a user tries to add a company that is similar to entries already in CIS, the user will be shown a list of the similar companies with the option to select an exisiting company, or to continue adding the new company.
The following are example of similar company names that would be flagged by CIS...
acronyms are found... Great British Steel will find GBS
and vice versa... GBS will find Great British Steel
wrong extensions are found... Bluesoft PLC will find Bluesoft Ltd
double hitting a key is also spotted... Blluesoft will find Bluesoft Ltd
different punctuation is found... G.B.S. will find GBS
Dynamic Groups Traditionally groups of contacts are made by manual selection. With CIS you can create dynamic groups. A dynamic group is defined by a rule, for example 'all managers in the London area', or 'all contacts with an email address and whose company have a website', or 'all sales reps from companies whose turnover is greater than £1,000,000'. When a new contact is added to CIS, or a contact's details are changed, that contact will automatically appear in any groups where the rule applies.
Automatic Document Filing Using CIS will mean you will never lose a document again. When you use CIS to open Microsoft Word to write a letter, fax or an email, the document is automatically saved in a logical filing structure. An activity is automatically logged in CIS, and the file is attached. It doesn't really matter what the document is called, or where it was saved. To find the document again simply click on the 'Attachment' link on the activity, and the document will be found and opened.
The Quickest Way to Record a Telephone Call CIS makes recording and timing telephone calls incredibly quick and easy. Simply start the telphone timer, jot down notes about the call either during the conversation or after in the space provided under the timer, and hit the Capture button. An activity is automatically logged with the length of the call and the notes made. It couldn't be easier.
Directly Populate an On-Line Diary CIS integrates with the Bluesoft On-line Diary. Simply select an activity and send it up the the diary with one key-stroke. Add diary entries for yourself or for colleagues. View the diary from anywhere in the world through just a web browser. The Bluesoft on-line diary has the following features...
Multi-user diary, share diary entries with colleagues
Set permissions to allow viewing and editing of your diary entries
Easily move, copy and delete entries
Make your diary public
The diary has links to useful sites such as news, weather and search engines and is designed to be used as your homepage
Rapid Time Sheet Entry
Most time sheets are inaccurate and late. CIS will help you combat this with the easiest way to log time spent on client projects yet. Instead of writing a time sheet at the end of the week and having to guess what hours you have worked, use CIS to log hours worked as they happen using the rapid time sheet entry interface.
Instead of waiting until the end of the week for time sheets to be written, and then waiting another week for the time sheets to be amalgamated, simply run a report from CIS that is up-to-date and accurate every day.
Advanced Reporting
CIS makes recording information very easy. CIS makes reporting on that information just as easy. Some of the reports that can be generated include...
Contact Reports For example print a list of phone numbers for contacts who belong to a certain group, or list addresses of all contacts who work in a certain area.
Activity Reports For example print the activities associated with a contact for a specified date range, or print and total all billable activities for a certain project.
Pipeline Reports For example see which prospects are close to signing up, or the value of sales achieved in a certain period.
Project Reports For example print client time sheets, monthly reports and total project reports for any project.
All reports allow you to select, group and sort to give a vast number of unique reports very quickly and very easily.
New report layouts can easily be generated either in-house with a copy of Crystal Reports, or by Bluesoft.
All reports can be exported in formats such as Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to name but a few.
Many Other Powerful Features
CIS is crammed full with useful features to make using CIS a must. Examples include...
Click the Address link, and you will be taken straight to a map of the area pinpointing the exact address.
Click the Email link, and a new email will be started addressed to the contact.
Click the Attachment link to find and open a document.
One click to email a contact's details to a colleague.
One click to email the details of an activity to a colleague.
Keyboard shortcuts such as CTRL T to telephone a contact and CTRL W to write to a contact.
Drag-and-drop documents onto activities to attach them.
Templates can be shared, so only one set needs to be kept up-to-date, and all correspondance from anywhere in the company is consistent.
All automatically filed documents can be stored in a central location, making them accessible to all users regardless of who created them. Staff being on holiday will never be the problem it used to be!
Excellent Support
You can test the speed of the Bluesoft support here and now!
Simply email support@bluesoft.co.uk and ask any questions you might have about CIS.
