One of America’s top law firms, located in Kansas City, has used Outlook for email communication, calendaring, and task filing. But the problem was that its processes didn’t reflect a team approach to work – so they decided to explore other options.
Most of the tools offered were not bad in the least. However, the main weakness was the location of the information outside of the Outlook environment, which was constantly open on the computers of the entire team. No one wanted to record the same information twice.
David Bell, a shareholder of the law firm, was slowly beginning to lose hope that the program he envisioned even existed. He was looking for software where he could have everything he needed in one place – Outlook. The problem was solved when he came across eWay-CRM.
The top priority was accessibility – a database with a link to Outlook, which can be accessed at any time and from anywhere. The entire company needs to have constant access to information from, for example, the court, detention centers, etc.
It is common for a whole group of specialists to work on individual legal cases, even on a daily basis, so it was necessary to enable each team member to record, view, and organize all activities related to the case at hand.
The ability to customize the program was essential. As can be expected from the legal profession, the team needed specific custom editing fields and processes.
Key customized adjustments required:
- A shared calendar for computers and mobile phones and devices so that each team member can edit dates, times and other elements.
- Create a group task list in Outlook so that any team member can then edit and reassign any task.
Ultimately, David Bell didn’t have to leave Outlook to find what he was looking for. He just needed to discover eWay-CRM.
From the very beginning of the collaboration, he was part of all of the phases of the implementation and saw it through to further development, it was truly a perfect collaboration.
The task and calendar setup was customized to allow the entire team to access, view, and change items.
“My job depends on effective communication with the client – that’s emails, phone calls, meetings and so on, keeping track of everything was always complicated. Plus, I have to work with tasks and appointments on my calendar. I also need to have access to the most up-to-date information regarding the client, regardless of who on my team recorded the data. And all of this needs to work within Outlook. One last thing – I need to customize the product myself so that everything fits my terminology and processes. And I can’t spend tens of thousands of dollars on a customized solution. For a very long time, I believed that the solution didn’t exist. And then one day I came across eWay-CRM. Then I talked to the team and the rest is history. Today we have a project page for every client. On it, people from the team can see all email communication, whether they sent/received those emails themselves or not, all calendar entries, tasks and meeting notes related to that client. All of this is immediately visible in Outlook,” says David Bell, a criminal defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri.
At eWay System, they strive to see things through the eyes of the client – so they suggested the entire law firm team become familiar with email tracking as well.
Now everyone has access to emails received by any team member. No extra copy is needed, not even a hidden one.
Additionally, there is a feature in eWay-CRM to automatically tag emails attached to contacts already stored in the CRM software – this feature saves a lot of time as it is no longer necessary to assign emails to individual clients or cases.
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