“Consultants need something different – not typical CRM, not typical Project Management, not isolated lists, not Email and Document folders – but a single sharable database of companies, people, plans, tasks, correspondence and documents.“
Consultants and smaller services businesses are different – they need to be flexible in the way they work, and focused on their competitive advantage.
They create value add for clients and, since every client is different, every project is different. Flexibility to fit processes to client projects is fundamental to winning new business and delivering customer service.
The delivery of services is often an extension of the sales process. There are no functional silos for sales and delivery in consulting. Everybody does some of everything.
Managing client expectations and perceptions is the major challenge. Making sure the entire business stays “on message” is vital for successful projects. That takes Relationship Management, with everybody knowing what the plan is, how it’s being met, and the conversations about it.
Achieving the shared, seamless and flexible, management of plans, integrated with client history records, needed by consultants can be hard. Typical information systems are built for larger businesses, working in departments and mostly doing the same thing every time.
Standard software offered for Customer Relationship Management – CRM – and Project Management just doesn’t work the way smaller services businesses do. It’s too rigid and complex, with features that never get used, and limited adaptability, to meet different needs.
Software designed to do somebody else’s job just gets in the way. Working around the rigidity while deciding between the features takes time and energy away from the main purpose – providing service to clients.
As a result these, businesses resort to a combination of spreadsheets and Stickie notes for planning and communication, with correspondence and documents stored somewhere else.
This approach has all the flexibility needed, but it’s hardly seamless, and can’t easily be shared. There’s a significant overhead in keeping everything in synch, and playing catch up when it isn’t. Ultimately the law of diminishing returns comes into play, and gets in the way.
At this point they need something different – not typical CRM, not typical Project Management, not isolated lists, not Email and Document folders – but a single sharable database of companies, people, plans, tasks, correspondence and documents.
That’s why we built Front Office Box.
But we didn’t stop at the database. We chose to extend the principles of business software with design- isolating the technology, removing the complexity and adding best practice.
Because of this Front Office Box looks, feels and works differently to other business software. It’s meant to. It adds value to users partly because it does all the normal things, but especially because of what it doesn’t do.
It doesn’t get in their way, stopping them doing what they want; and it doesn’t soak up their time with un-neccessary complexity.
