What to use next after OCM?
Microsoft’s Outlook Customer Manager (OCM) is coming to an end of its run as a lite CRM solution embedded in Outlook. Microsoft has published that it will cease to support OCM in June 2020.
Outlook Customer Manager provided incredible benefit to firms in the the 1-5 CRM user space by allowing users to manage daily business sales and marketing operations through Outlook. OCM’s essential Outlook integration helped to simplify these functions, consolidating efforts into a single portal rather than multiple softwares.
If you are a small business owner you may be wondering where to turn for a sturdy and simple CRM replacement.
Fortunately, firms using OCM can easily transition to Prophet CRM, the leading provider of Outlook-based CRM. As with OCM, Prophet CRM users can manage pipelines with opportunities and projects within Outlook. Teams can consolidate deal-specific information and interaction for collaboration, and managers can have a high-level view of all the functions within the business.
For Outlook Customer Manager users who are comfortable within the Outlook interface Prophet CRM provides a familiar and recognizable experience. This allows onboarding to Prophet CRM to be quick and easy for transitioning OCM teams.
What can you do with Prophet CRM?
- Contact Management
- Account Management
- Opportunity Management
- Relationship Management
- Pipeline Reporting
- Activity Reporting
- Sales Automation
- Workflow Automation
- Document Generation
- Email Tracking
- Track Notes and Meetings
- Plan Next Steps
Contacts, Companies, and Deals
Outlook Customer Manager and Prophet CRM follow a similar database format, categorizing individual records as Contacts, Companies, or “Deals/Opportunities.” The comparable format will allow for OCM users to easily transition information from OCM to Prophet CRM. Additionally, teams will not have to change the familiar language and processes to accommodate an unfamiliar solution.
OCM users will be pleased to find that Prophet CRM offers a similar “Excel-like” interface where they can easily filter and select records. As with OCM, Prophet CRM provides the user flexibility to create multiple custom views to explore and recall information from the database.
CRM Reporting – The Big Difference
The primary differentiator between Outlook Customer Manager and Prophet CRM is the incredibly detailed pipeline and activity reporting Prophet CRM provides. Through Prophet CRM managers have access to traditional PDF-style reports or modern analytic reports to measure their team’s progress.
Prophet CRM utilizes embedded Power BI, enabling users to see trends in their key metrics. These reporting tools enable sales and project teams to visually reflect KPI’s related to customer interaction, pipeline conversion, and team productivity towards goals.
Mobile CRM
Both Outlook Customer Manager and Prophet CRM offer mobile apps to assist teams on the go. OCM and Prophet CRM’s mobile applications are separate environments from the Microsoft Outlook mobile application.