Customer relationship management (CRM) is a way to manage all of your company’s relationships. The goal of CRM is to organize your interactions with customers to improve relationships. By keeping all of your communications in one central location, you can streamline processes, connect with new and prospective customers and improve profits.
Salesforce: #1 Rated CRM in the World
One of the best CRM systems available is Salesforce. This #1 rated CRM offers cloud-based applications for businesses of all sizes. Best of all, there’s no need to hire an IT person to set up or manage the CRM system. It can be done easily from a single interface that is accessible from anywhere.
Here are a few benefits of integrating CRM software like Salesforce into your business.
- Find the right customers
- Organize customer information
- Enhance communication
- Improve customer service
- Automate everyday tasks
- Boost efficiency between teams
- Analyze and report data
How Access and Salesforce Work Together
If you’re using Salesforce or planning on using a CRM, you’ll be happy to know that Access 2016 included with Office 365 lets you link to or import data from Salesforce. When you link data, Access creates a two-way connection that synchronizes data in both Access and Salesforce. To import data, Access creates a one-time copy of the data but does not synchronize it.
Here are a few tips to ensure that linking to or importing data goes smoothly.
- Identify all information that is necessary to connect, including a username, password and token (case-sensitive alphanumeric code).
- Enable API access to use the ODBC driver.
- Identify the tables that you want to import or link to. You can import or link to one or multiple tables in a single operation.
- Access does not support more than 255 fields in a table, so consider this when importing tables. If there is more than 255 fields, only the first 255 will be chosen.
- Determine how much data is being linked to or imported. The maximum size that Access allows is two gigabytes. Salesforce can contain tables larger than this, which means they can’t be imported into a single database. Linking to the data is the best option in this case.
- Secure your Access database and connection information with a strong password.
For more information on linking to or importing data from Salesforce to Access 2016, call Arkware. One of our Microsoft Access database experts will be happy to help!