ERP beats Excel at CRM

Today I witnessed what was supposed to be a small victory in my fight against using Excel in the workplace. I was called into the General Manager's office where I was asked about our ERP program's abilities in the realm of Customer Relation Management (CRM). I explained that I had developed a module several years ago for tracking events and all the people that were invited to that event, including the status of each person (invited, declined, participated, etc). I also explained that I have instructed at least four people in the use of this module and none of them had left much of note (all of these four no longer work with the company and I sincerely hope that there was some other reason than this module!).

Enter the woman who has been dealing with CRM the past few months. She of course has been maintaining her 'database' in Excel and sees nothing wrong with that. The GM told her that her data have to be transferred to Priority so that they can be managed properly - here is my small victory (I didn't have to persuade the GM that Priority is a better tool than Excel for CRM).

A few hours later, the woman sent me her spreadsheet and straight away I knew that we had a problem. Although theoretically I can simply copy her list of contacts and paste it into Priority, this won't work in practice because not all of her contact have previously been defined in Priority. Not only that, some of the contacts were defined with first names only; as unfortunately no one has ever bothered to devote the necessary amount of attention to defining contacts in Priority, some of the contacts already existing are also on a first name basis only. There may be a match between the first names, but the non-existent surnames may well be different.

I tried to show her how to work with the program but she wasn't too enthusiastic. "Why can't I continue to maintain my lists in Excel?" was the question; I explained to her why Excel is not the tool for the job. At the moment, we have deadlock as she is not prepared to take her list, to check whether each person exists in Priority, to check the details, etc.

Hopefully she does appreciate the value of the data once they have been entered. But she's heavily pregnant and wants to get the job done today (this is a failing of many people here; they want to get the job done but don't want to handle the necessary paperwork). We are currently waiting for the GM to return in order to discuss the subject further.