More people should be using CRMs for personal and business relationship management

Customer Relationship Manager solutions don’t have to be just for businesses. Jack Wallen believes you can leverage a CRM platform for both personal and professional needs.

In today’s world, I find myself constantly inundated with contacts from just about every walk of my life. I have personal, professional, social and casual relationships with information that’s clogged up my brain to the point where it becomes next to impossible for me to remember it all. Case in point, I depend on Facebook to remind me when someone has a birthday.

That’s neither a sustainable nor efficient model for keeping tabs on everyone in my orbit.

What if I told you there’s a better way than using a simplified contact manager, such as the one found on your mobile device or email client. I’m talking about the tried and true Customer Relationship Manager. Business users have been leveraging this type of tool for years to make it exponentially easier to keep tabs on customers, clients, leads and much more.

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If it’s good enough for businesses, why isn’t it good enough for your personal or professional life? If you find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of information you collect about your contacts, and a normal contact application isn’t enough to keep your head above water, a CRM might be just what you need.

At this point, you might be asking yourself: “Isn’t a CRM a bit overkill for someone who doesn’t need to keep track of leads, opportunities and cases?” Although many CRM tools would offer features that you might never use, that shouldn’t keep you from considering this powerful, flexible route to relationship management.

Think about it this way: Do you use every feature of your office suite? I would venture a guess that the majority of users use a minority of the features in Office365 or Google Workspaces. Don’t believe me? Have you ever touched the Google Workspaces Forms tool? Or what about Jamboard? The truth is, most users only scratch the surface of the features that are offered in the applications they use. So why should this same thing hold you back from working with a CRM?

It shouldn’t.

Even though a CRM might include features you’ll never use, it will also provide everything you need to keep all of the information about your relationships in a single, convenient location. Even better, you can create custom fields of all types, so the types and amount of information you can keep for a contact is limitless. Imagine having what amounts to a complete Wiki on every one of your contacts, so you would never not know something about them.

Lately, I’ve taken to using the CRM component of ONLYOFFICE for that very purpose. With this tool, I can keep track of nearly every aspect of my relationships, so I don’t have to try and force my aging brain to house all of that information for me. And given ONLYOFFICE can be deployed for free on your LAN, you don’t have to worry that deploying the platform will cost you a single penny.

How do I make this tool usable as a personal CMS? It’s actually quite simple. Although I’m not using tools such as Opportunities and Invoices, I can use the Personal and Business contact features to great effect. Let me show you how.

How to customize contact information in ONLYOFFICE

If you log into ONLYOFFICE and go to the CRM tool, you can then click Create | Person. Instead of filling out the information for this contact, first click Customize User Fields (Figure A).

Figure A

In the resulting window (Figure B), click New Field.

Figure B

In the popup (Figure C), give the field a name, and select the type of field to be added from text, text area, select box, checkbox, title and date.

Figure C

Once you’ve created your custom field, click Save and the new field is ready to go. Create as many custom fields as you need that will make it easier for you to keep track of the information you need.

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Once you’ve created the custom fields, create a new Person (contact) and you’ll be able to add information for those fields (Figure D).

Figure D

Once you’ve nailed the customized fields, you’ll find that keeping tabs on your various types of relationships is incredibly easy with a CRM. Yes, the CRM tool you choose might be overkill, but it’s better to have too much, than too little.

If you’re not keen on deploying your own instance of ONLYOFFICE, you could try one of these options (each of which is either free or offers a free plan):

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