Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to handle your sales opportunities can become all the more powerful when it also includes data from Reckon.

Recently Reckon hosted a webinar with Tall Emu on how Reckon customers can get the maximum benefit from using their CRM with data imported from Reckon. We sat down with Tall Emu’s CEO Mike Nash after the webinar to find out a little bit more about Tall Emu.

Reckon: How much support or training is available to people using Tall Emu CRM?
Mike: While operational out of the box, Tall Emu CRM is designed to be customised to the needs of the business. This is a process that can be performed over days, weeks, months or even years depending on client needs. Some of our clients use the “classic CRM” note-taking features only, and we’d rarely hear from them. Other clients engage on a continuous business process improvement program which results in regular onsite visits, ongoing enhancements made to their system to integrate, automate and streamline their business.

R: How easy is it to integrate Tall Emu with Reckon Accounts? Do you need a technical understanding?
M: The physical connection with Reckon is easy – it is just point and click, and it works.  There’s a video of it on Youtube which demonstrates the mechanics of it. For most of our clients though, we’ll handle the installation, checking of this data and initial setup along with training because usually when clients are interconnecting their accounting system with our CRM they are doing so as part of a wider purpose – normally business process improvement or system integration.


R: When combining Reckon data into a CRM with your clients other information, what sort of insights can be gained?
M: If the CRM is used as intended, then right away when you integrate the two you can have an instant picture of a client when they email you using our Inbox 360 Outlook plugin. You can start to make use of the KPI reporting system which will show sales data and other operational data instantly – as basic as “how many sales am I making” through to “what is the average time to convert a quote to a sale for this salesman?”.

As you integrate with other data – you can expand this even more. How long does it take us from when someone first visits our website until contact? How many contacts to a quote? What is the cost to support this client (based on phone records which tie in automatically) versus the revenue? If your leads are obtained via adwords, but your sales happen offline some time later – can you attribute the marketing spend to the sale? Is your business otherwise growing but you are losing some clients – one of our reports shows you changes in customer behaviour over time which may indicate you’re losing them based on a mixture of sales and other activity.

R: If a Tall Emu CRM user has customers who use competing accounting platforms, how easily is that accommodated?
M: Easily enough. We’ve seen most people who move accounting systems tend to have a lot of manual work to do and quite often they will transfer over ledger balances meaning that they would possibly lose a lot of historical data or have to work with two systems. In Tall Emu, what we can do is transfer details to the new accounting system – say active customers, plus open invoices for example. CRM still retains the data from the old accounting system – and this is transferred into the new as and when it is needed.


R: Can users access Tall Emu remotely, away from their desktop?
M: We can work using Terminal Services, Replicated (offline mode CRM) and our mobile application as well.