How To Use a Front Office Box

“Our Getting Started tutorial suggests new users make a start with a simple ToDo list. It only takes a couple of minutes and the user easily learns the main functions through this simple set up”.

This question needs to get asked more often, because there are people who sign up for an account but never use it. If they’d only spend a little time understanding why we do what, they’d be more focused on what they need to achieve and have more time to do it.So, in this post we’re going to explain the why and how, but in order not to waste your time lets apply the filter.

If you:

are looking for something specifically built to suit your business

think you know about systems and are looking for CRM

find chaos exciting and organization boring

are too busy to save time

you’re in the wrong place! Thank you for your time – you can leave now.

For those of us left in the room, let me first explain.

If we aren’t a Fortune 5000 company typical business software is no good for us. That’s because it’s always built to work the way those guys do – departments, roles, reports, organization silos and parallel processes.

Smaller businesses don’t work like that. Everybody does a bit of everything. They share information and back each other up. They’re all part of the same “department” and they only have a serial process, one that starts with the first call and ends with the repeat order and referral.

So smaller businesses need different software to big businesses. That software needs to do a number of things:

keep information within the context it needs to be found e.g. correspondence and documents need to be found on the same page as the company and the people. Completed and outstanding actions need to be in the same place.

provide a capability to plan and assign actions within processes, and keep company, people, correspondence and documents on the same page, within the context of the plan

provide a timeline dimension to the information – what’s supposed to happen today, tomorrow and next week, and related to which companies and people.

enables Plan>Act>Review workflow without it getting in the users way.

This is why Front Office Box works the way it does, but the majority of our users don’t care – they just use it, because it makes life easier. I’m not explaining this so you’ll understand what FOB does, I’m explaining why it doesn’t work they way you might expect.

So how does anybody use it, particularly if they do things differently every time and don’t have time to get into a major implementation project.

The answer is they just use it. Our generic record structures and workflow suits just about anything, with a little imagination.

We’ve built our company and people records so it doesn’t matter whether they’re customers or vendors, or even partners. What matters is, whichever the relationship, we keep everything in the context of the relationship.

We’ve built our opportunity management records so it doesn’t matter whether the plan is sales, customer service, projects, or even cash due and cash due to be paid. Everything is a series of stuff that needs to get done along a timeline. What matters is whichever type the plan, we keep everything in the context of the plan.

We’ve built our timeline in its own context. The business has it’s own timeline with actions due and who they’re assigned to. Each individual also has his/her own timeline. To make it easy to understand the way the timeline context relates to relationships and plans we provide links to all those records direct from our dashboard.

Our Getting Started tutorial suggests new users make a start with a simple ToDo list. It only takes a couple of minutes and the user easily learns the main functions through this simple set up.

What about all those addresses?

Hands up – I’ll admit this is a problem, but it isn’t a Front Office Box problem.

The problem is the source data, wherever it comes from. If everybody kept their address books complete and consistent, and people in the same business didn’t duplicate names and addresses across their address books, we could automate building the Address Book.

But they don’t, so we can’t.

What we can do is provide upload templates so new users can copy/paste data from .csv export or spreadsheet files, consolidate and clean the records and then upload to build an accurate, usuable, sharable, business resource.

So actually we’ve made this whole thing as absolutely simple as possible.

Anybody who can’t get started has more problems than we can solve.

They’ll just have to stay with their mash up of Sticky notes, email system, spreadsheets and documents.