Turning HaloPSA's CRM notes into a real QBR process

Connor: I watched a video the other day on YouTube and it was Richard Hammond talking about how he addresses the audience as individuals so I'm talking to you today. If you like this new vibe let me know. I'm not going to say hey you guys, I'm not going to say welcome. I'm going to say how are you doing. So if you're watching this video, I'm Connor Fagan and today we're going to be touching on how we handle QBRs in Halo.

And I know QBRs are a point of contention. Some people love them, some people hate them. I'm just here to tell you if you like them, how you can do them. I am particularly an advocate for QBRs. I like having a set period in time when we go and meet with our clients. But the way they're delivered can be handled in many, many ways and I'll let you define how you want to do them, if at all.

But I'm talking today about CRM notes in Halo, and I don't see this used particularly very often. But if you leverage it enough for your business, it can actually be really tangible. It can actually provide you some real good insights into your customers and you can, as their preferred tech provider, work with them to help them grow. It can also be a really good place to log and document any concerns they may have so you have that as a record where you and your team can congregate on that and handle things as a collective.

But without getting into the weeds of how you run your business, let me show you how I run mine and how we do this. So spoiler: I don't do QBRs. It's just not in the line of work I do. But if I was to do QBRs, here's what I would do. So if you're familiar at the customer level, we have a tab called CRM notes. Now I'm just going to delete this note and say I don't want to see it. And this could be enabled just so your account management team see it. This could be enabled that everyone could see it. If you're not aware of how to do that, there is a video that Sondela did this week on custom profile filters. I will link it in the description below. He runs through how you can edit the order of sequence of this stuff.

If anything that is missed, you want me to cover, let me know in the description below and I will happily do a video covering any gaps. But for the most part, I think it is a pretty good video. So what are CRM notes? Well, they're exactly that. Although if you have the CRM section, it can kind of get a little bit muddy in what these actually mean. What this really is is just a customer note section. And if we click add, there's some pre-built things in here that we can control or not control, and we'll go on to in a minute to provide information.

So I can put something in here like hello, spoke to, we made a testing. They testing, testing, they they love us, but they need some top tier merch. Right, I spent an hour chatting with these so we can track our time and how long our account managers are actually spending doing these QBRs. When did we do it? I did it today at 4:30. I know what you're thinking, Connor, it's only 4:23, are you working in the future? Yes I am. And then we can set a satisfaction level. It is currently one through ten. There's a nice lovely UI there, but let's say that they are ten out of ten.

And next, when do I want to call them? When I did a quick test of this a minute ago and you'll see something funny as to why I had to move on, but we can do add a week, add a month, add a year and it will jump the calendar up for you. And that is out of the box how you log notes to your clients with a satisfaction level, how long it took, when you did it, and what you discussed.

But in true fashion, there's a few more things we can do with this. So let's dive into that, shall we? So first things first, CRM notes at the customer level—it's cute, it's nice. We can edit these notes, we can report on it, we can do all that fun stuff. But it's not very, how do I describe it, process driven for me. There are points of engagement or points of contact I would want our account managers to be checking in with, ask the same questions, making sure we capture unified communication, unified feedback from our partners. And there's a way we can handle that in Halo.

Now I embarrassed myself on the recording I did before this because I thought this was much newer than it was. I thought this was done in the past three months. This was in fact introduced in July last year, so I'm nine months old in getting this video out. But it is what it is. So click configuration in the bottom left-hand side, click on custom objects. If you can see it, you can't, it'll be underneath my head. I'm not moving myself. You can deal with it. And then there will be custom fields. And then in here you can click the top left arrow and move down to CRM notes.

Now I'm lacking imagination today. Robbie's currently on holiday and I'm finding half an hour to get a video out because I'm a fool, even though I'm drowning in work. But I'm going to turn to our trusted beautiful AI engine of ChatGPT. And I realised in the last recording I asked a few secret questions that I don't want you all to see, like how long should the average, anyway, moving on. So let's ask it, what are some good QBR questions? I am a Managed IT service provider. And let's see what it comes back with.

As a Managed IT service provider, your QBR quarterly business review questions should aim to assess the current state of your client IT infrastructure, understand their business goals, and identify areas for development. And there's a bunch of questions it gives me here. So the first one is: what is the business goals and objectives? These are things we need to be finding out. So what we can then do is jump back into Halo, of course, go back to that custom fields and we can make one. And this was called business goals and objectives.

Business goals and objectives. And we can give this the same field label as that: business goals and objectives. And then we can define what type of field it is. This could be a simple text box. This could be a rich text field. I think I'm about to highlight a bug with this, so you'll have to bear with me. But we can then define some questions: What are your short-term business goals? How does your IT infrastructure support? How does your IT infrastructure support these goals? How does your, it's a weird question. Are there any new business initiatives planned that may require IT support?

And then we can go down and say this is a mandatory field and I want to show it on the CRM notes. And you would think I've played this game before. Please remember: don't be like Connor. Your field name cannot contain any spaces, spaces or special characters. So there we go, and now we have business goals and objectives and the default value.

So I can make a new one and we have our first question. It hasn't put the default text in there, not too concerned. We can look back at that in a moment. But what you'll notice is we now have this here. The problem is, as it currently stands, when I save this, it passes through all the HTML, which isn't great. I have this logged with Halo. So for now, what I recommend doing is don't use rich text fields, but in fact just use a simple text field.

Field hint. I think this is what we can do here. What you goals? How does your IT infrastructure support these goals? Okay, that's better. If I could read that, help. Everything right. Field is mandatory. And way we go. And again, jumping back into CRM notes, not CRM. See, this is why it gets complicated. Add a new one. And the questions are in here. It's not overly pretty, but we could make these much simpler lines. You can also add stuff in here, such as, you know, scoring mechanism, so a drop-down: one through five. How do you rate this? How do you rate that? What do you think of Connor? Minus one, whatever, whatever, whatever.

But you're starting to build out a real nice form inside of Halo that can help you track your CRM notes for your customers, which can be leveraged in your QBR reviews. And that is all I'm going to touch on today with this. As far as I know, there is no control over anything else in here. I will briefly pause this video and jump cut if there is anything we can do. I'll be back momentarily.

Jump cut. There is a few things we can do. We can disable the horrible show satisfaction on CRM note, and we can also display a field for extra details. So if we just go back into CRM notes and click add, the satisfaction has now gone. We can then build our own satisfaction, maybe a one through five or a one to three: happy, not happy, sad. And we've also got extra details if we need it.

The problem is though, I'm pretty sure when I do this and press save, no, you see, see, it's all about learning. You can obviously add this extra column now, which you then can expand and contract on. And again, you could add your fields in here with the questions you want for a quick and easy way. You could then build a dashboard on this so you could report on all of your customers in here with CRM notes. You could even do a few things in here, such as mentions.

So what they now support in here, I believe what they've told me they do, yep, in the extra details is they now support mentions. So if you want it extra detailed and you know, make sure that Robbie, please ring this customer because X, Y and Z, we could have a trigger for that, link it back to the CRM now and then make sure that we are keep it on top of this customer and making sure they're really happy.

Sometimes if you have, you know, a really bad experience with your client, an additional thing to always remember is you can go over to settings. You can go into popup notes and we can make a popup note which can say something like: this client is really unhappy. Make sure the level of support we give is the same as always. You see, we always give the best support here. We can show that as modal, display as HTML, do whatever you like. We can only show it between particular dates.

But what that allows us to do is whenever an engineer interfaces with a ticket for that customer, it will pop up in your face, or down here in this case, giving us a note on the ticket. Or if we define it as a modal, it will pop up in our face. This is a horrible video. It will pop up in our face and will show us exactly what we need to see to make sure that, oh okay, the client's really unhappy. Make sure we give, make sure the level of support we give is always the same. We always give the best level of service here at whatever sandbox this is called. And again, it's just adding mechanisms in place to really improve the support and the customer experience that you give to your customers, your partners.

And I think this is just a cute simple way of doing it. There's not a bunch of configure to do here. You can add custom tables in here as well if you want to. And there's a bunch of things I'm really intrigued to see what you come up with. Please do have at it, have fun. If there's anything else I've missed, anything I actually think would be really cool to see in here, please do let me know and I'll try and do a follow video.

But as always, I've been Connor Fagan. We are Renada Solutions and have a beautiful day and hopefully I will see you all soon. Take care, bye-bye.