CRM setup means giving your business one shared, trustworthy customer list: names, contact details, past jobs or visits, quotes and notes, all in one place your whole team can see. We choose a tool sized for your business, clean up and import the details currently spread across phones, paper and spreadsheets, and configure it around the way your people actually work.
What it is
A CRM is a customer list with memory. For a Burnaby painter, it remembers that the townhouse on Cariboo Road had the same colour scheme done four years ago. For a physiotherapy clinic, it remembers which practitioner a client prefers and when they were last seen. For a renovation company, it remembers every open quote and when it was sent.
The software is the easy part. The real work is deciding what to record, cleaning the data you already have, and making it faster to use the system than to scribble on paper.
Who it is for
Any business that quotes, sees repeat customers or has more than one person answering enquiries.
- Trades with an office person and crews in the field, where job notes need to travel both ways
- Clinics and studios that track clients across several practitioners
- Retail and repair shops taking orders, deposits and special requests
- Businesses about to hire, where a new person will need the customer history on day one
If you are a sole operator with twenty regular customers, a well-kept phone contact list may be enough for now. We'll tell you if that's the case.
What's included
Everything from choosing the tool to the first month of use.
- Requirements list. The handful of features you really need, ranked, so products can be compared on substance.
- Tool selection. Two or three suitable options described by function and cost, with a recommendation and the reasons for it.
- Data clean-up. Collecting contacts from phones, notebooks, spreadsheets and old software; removing duplicates; standardising phone numbers and addresses.
- Import and testing. A sample import first, checked with you, then the full move.
- Configuration. Fields, job stages, quote templates and user permissions set to match your process.
- Privacy basics. Collecting only what you need and limiting who sees sensitive notes. BC's Personal Information Protection Act applies to private organizations that collect, use or disclose personal information; we point you to the official guidance rather than interpret it.
Timeline
Three to six weeks for most small businesses.
| Week | Work |
|---|---|
| 1 | Requirements, tool shortlist and decision |
| 2–3 | Data gathering and clean-up |
| 3–4 | Configuration and sample import |
| 4–5 | Full import, training and go-live |
| 6 | Check-in and fixes |
The clean-up stage is where time goes. A business with 3,000 contacts across three sources might find a quarter of them are duplicates or out of date.
How results are measured
We check whether the team uses the system and whether customers notice. Practical measures include the share of new enquiries recorded within a day, the number of quotes with a next step logged, time to find a customer's history, and how many paper or spreadsheet records are still in use a month later. If the paper diary is still on the counter, we haven't finished.
Mistakes to avoid
- Too many fields. Every required field is a reason for staff to skip the system. Start with eight to twelve.
- Importing everything untouched. Old, duplicate records make people distrust the new list.
- One login shared by everyone. It hides who changed what and causes security problems.
- Choosing on price alone. A free tool that nobody can use on a phone in a strata parkade costs more in the end.
- No owner. Someone on staff needs to be responsible for keeping records tidy.
With records in place, the natural next steps are customer booking and follow-up automation. Our guide to choosing a CRM walks through the decision in more detail, and the pricing page explains how this work is billed. Ready to talk? Call, text or email.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is a CRM for a small business?
In plain terms, a shared customer list. Each customer has a record with contact details, past jobs or visits, quotes, notes and messages. Bigger products add pipelines and reports, but a small business mainly needs everyone looking at the same up-to-date list.
How much does CRM software cost?
It varies widely by product and number of users, from free tiers for very small teams to several hundred dollars a month for larger ones. We give you a realistic range during the audit and choose a product whose cost matches the value it returns.
Who owns the customer data?
You do. The account is opened in your business's name, you hold the main login, and we make sure you know how to export everything. If we stop working together, nothing leaves with us.
Do we have to follow privacy rules for customer records?
BC's Personal Information Protection Act governs how private organizations collect, use and disclose personal information. We design records to collect only what you need, but we don't give legal advice; the OIPC for BC publishes guidance for businesses.
Can you move our data from an older system?
Usually, yes. Most tools can export to a spreadsheet file. We clean, de-duplicate and map that data into the new system, and we test the import on a sample before moving everything.