TL;DR
I have two main issues:
- How do I get a view (on Desk preferably, but CRM as a fallback) for CS agents to be able to quickly see at a glance what products customers have bought and when?
- How do I integrate these historical purchases on a new implementation when I'm only rebuilding the accounting from 2020 forward?
Background
My company manufactures and sells products direct-to-consumer. We've been in business for 15 years, and our product is a durable good. Our customers can call in with questions many years after purchasing.
We use WooCommerce as our ecommerce store. This is where we have historically gotten 90+% of our sales, so it also functions as a de facto CRM for our customer service agents to find what customers have ordered in the past.
We started using Desk maybe a year or so ago, and we subscribed to Zoho One maybe six months ago. We're in the process of moving our accounting over. This is including completely rebuilding our 2020 books (partially so that our CPA can validate, partially so we can have year-on-year reporting).
The customer export and data hygiene process necessary to move 2020 customers and purchases made it logical for us to export and cleanse all of our historical customer information at the same time. The intent is to push over that information, as well.
Current Status | Setup
Starting from scratch in Books and CRM and a year-old implementation of Desk, I set up the native Zoho integrations as follows:
- Books/Inventory <---> CRM
- CRM ---> Desk
The idea here is that there's a lot of garbage contacts from our intake process in Desk that I didn't want to have polluting CRM and Finance, and that seems to be working.
Also, the native CRM invoicing and estimate modules are hidden to eliminate confusion with the shared Finance versions of those modules.
I added my entire cleansed historical customer list by importing it into Books. The syncs seem to behave as predicted, as our historical customer contact information is now available in CRM and Desk.
As a test, I've entered some 2020 customer purchases into Books. A few are standalone invoices, and a few went through the whole Sales Order --> Package --> Invoice process. I did this to see if it added anything to the CRM or Desk information.
PROBLEM #1 - Product Visibility Issue
One of the main drivers for moving to Zoho One is to have data availability across modules. Specifically, I need our CSRs to be able to quickly see historical product information for a customer who calls or writes with a problem.
The Finance integration doesn't really do a great job of this. You can see invoice numbers and amounts for customers who have an invoice in Finance (more on this limitation below). But even with these customers, you can't easily see what product(s) they have without opening up the invoice itself.
It seems like the Inventory and Books tabs on Desk are highly redundant. Why not have a view on the Inventory tab where you can just see three columns: Date, Product, and Quantity. For any product-based business, that seems like the critical information needed for customer service when a customer calls in.
PROBLEM #2 - Historical Information
As I said in the intro, we're a 15 year old company. We have lots of historical purchase info that needs to be integrated.
We can't enter historical sales as invoices into the Finance suite without totally re-creating 15 years worth of accounting and inventory. That's essentially impossible.
So we need to get this product info into the Zoho ecosystem in a way that will blend nicely with future sales.
My first attempt was to associate a product with the contact in CRM. While this worked, I can't associate dates or quantities purchased, so the info is extremely limited. It doesn't look like one could tell the difference between a customer who bought one item in 2010 and another in 2018 and a customer who bought a single item in 2017. Second, this info doesn't sync with Desk.
I then tried to associate a product with the contact in Desk. I haven't waited long enough to see whether this syncs with CRM, but the data appears nowhere in a ticket for a contact. In fact, I don't see where that data is accessible in any context other than the tab in which it was entered.
So what do I do? How do I enter historical customer-product relationships and have that data viewable in Desk (or, at worst, in CRM) for CSRs trying to help customers?