CRM systems can be intimidating at first, especially for non technical personnel, but once you understand the user interface, data relationships, its underlying purpose of the CRM and the terminology, it becomes much more clear.
We want people to embrace CRM as at its best it can reshape your organisation and deliver better services and efficiencies. For that reason, we've put this terminology list and explanation together, to help you get your head around the building blocks of CRM.
Entity
A module or section which groups together data. For example, Leads, Opportunities, Contacts are all examples of entities. You can also set up custom ones tailored to your organisation. You can find more information about how these are structured at the Microsoft Community website.
Dashboards
A bit like the dashboard in your car, these are views that quickly displays important information that is relevant to you. These are often KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) such as conversion information, web sign ups and more.
The beauty of them is that they are highly customisable to fit the needs of the individual user and can provide quick data visualisations that can measure the performance of individuals, teams and entire departments. We recently covered this in a bit more detail if you want to understand its core benefits.
Field
This is simply a normal box that the user can enter a single piece of data. They should be labelled so that the user understands what is appropriate information to add that will relate to it. For example:
Phone number: 555-222-1612
Email: communications@serversys.com
Contact Name: Daniel Norris
Record
A collection of fields that are related to one another. For instance a contact entity would likely have fields such as Name, Job Title, Email. Once clicked on and opened up, the user will be able to see all the field data entries that are attached the record.
Forms
A form is the view within CRM where a user can add data to a record or change it once it has already been saved.
Views
The interface to change and interact with information. Using menus to navigate from one view to the next which can enable users to drill down and filter information. For example, you may want to look at the view of a employee of a business customer, and then switch to a view of the company and finally the account manager who owns both the records underneath it.
Parent and Child
Nothing to do with family! As mentioned above, you will likely need to have a hierarchy of records which have a relationship. For example an organisation may have a parent company and therefore CRM needs to reflect this relationship and connect the data together.
We hope this list helps new users to become familiar with the technical terms related to CRM. If you have any questions that we haven't commented on, please feel free to get in touch.
