It’s Halloween … but don’t let your administrative staff get scared of GoldMine!
Are your administrative personnel afraid of GoldMine? Does your executive assistant or secretary cringe when they’re asked to work with GoldMine? It might be Halloween, but there’s nothing scary about using GoldMine and I can show them in my layman voice how to tame the beast!
Quite frankly, when I started with First Direct back 12 years ago as the Office Manager with 20+ years office experience under my belt, I was scared stiff when I saw GoldMine and its tabs and buttons and wondered if I could apply my experience to the system … and I have. So, if I can do it then anyone can. You want the experience … but getting them to toss the white out in the trash and dig into GoldMine might scare them.
But, your Administrative staff doesn’t have to be a technician or computer wiz to use GoldMine … nor should they be! I gotta tell you; very rarely will you find a superb administrative person with a superb technical affinity. It’s like asking your Master Plumber to design your garden. It’s just not feasible. Completely separate skill sets and mind sets. So, leave the technical stuff to the technician! If they get an error, they should go for coffee and come back and it’s fixed! So, no technical tips here.
Embrace your administrative person where they are and put their minds and hearts at ease and let them know GoldMine’s not scary! And, I can prove it! (By the way, if you like some of these ideas, you might want to schedule your staff for my webinar set for Thursday, Nov. 15th, 1-2pm Eastern Time – click here http://www.1stdirect.com/events/index.html#officestaff
The biggest tip administrative staff can learn is to touch things once and only once. So, we need to use GoldMine in a way to make our activities the most efficient by using our treasures (time and effort) as efficiently as possible with next actions updated and scheduled appropriately.
The way to do that is consistency, repetition and format. Keep all your activities in a specific format – so they’re easier to identify and focus on. Just utilize your scheduled activities list and drill down your day.
Activities you consistently do … where/how do you keep them? No paper ‘n pens or white out here – use your GoldMine.
My usual activities (and most administrative staff can attest) can be boiled down to specific topics – mine include order processing (past/present/future), customer service (billing, collections, relationship building), product or sales follow-up and that’s pretty much it.
Where does your work come from?
Email – either reply and it’s done – or, if it requires follow up, schedule a next action for yourself and paste in the email or paraphrase the need.
[HOW TO: Schedule, next action, reference line (BE CONSISTENT), date and time for follow up, paste in the email or some notes, click schedule at the bottom and forget it!]
Voice mail – call customer, complete the call in GoldMine – or, if it requires follow up, same as above, schedule a next action.
TIP: But, did you know there’s a tiny box at the bottom of your completed call that you can choose to have a reminder follow up?
[HOW TO: Complete unscheduled outgoing call, reference line (BE CONSISTENT), date and time for follow up, paraphrase the issue in the notes section – BUT, before completing, click the box at the bottom and schedule another follow up for yourself.) One step, two processes, and forget it!
Chat (IM) – same thing, if it’s done, close it and forget it – or, if it requires follow up, schedule a next action and paste the chat in notes and set a follow up date.
[HOW TO: Schedule, next action, reference line (BE CONSISTENT), date and time for follow up, paste in the chat in the notes, click schedule at the bottom and forget it!]
TIP: Or, maybe that chat should be in notes tab if it’s something particular to that customer that’s “outside the box” – so, copy and paste chat in the notes tab.
Your Activities List
[HOW TO: Open left nav (left side navigator), pull up the bottom line so you can see the “Activities” Tab – and choose show: today; User: you!
And voila there are your activities for today …
TIP: Keep the reference lines as consistent & small as possible. As mentioned above, my usual activities can be boiled down to specific topics as outlined above – order processing (past/present/future), customer service issues (billing, collections, relationship building), product or sales follow-up.
Email Templates
I cannot emphasize enough how administrative tasks are repetitious, so let’s create email templates for everything that you do repetitively. I mean everything!
[HOW TO: GoTo, Document Templates, Email Templates, Defaults, RIGHT CLICK ON New message, clone, User (YOU!), subject “whatever you want,” save.
TIP: Use a previous email … that’s right, legally plagiarize previous emails! Find a previous email sent, edit, and choose re-queue. How easy can it be to pull out a previous email, massage it a little and off it goes.
Although using the activities list, creating email templates and clicking a little box at the close of an incoming call might not be much at the outset … but, I promise you, if you master these three little items you’ll save a whole lot of time looking for things and prioritizing!
Happy mining in GoldMine and Happy Halloween!
