Managing Your Relationship with Customers -

In any small business, it is natural to see one of the following scenarios

1. The company has lot of information about its customers. The longer it is associated with its customer the more it knows.  But the information is not shared. It is only available to certain departments or certain key people in those departments.

2.  If a sales person wants to know the status of his order delivery, he has to contact the holders of the information. If the sales person wants to know the status of the problem being faced by the customer he has to contact the customer support department. The information is available with the company but he needs to contact every time the customer is online.

3. If the customer support department receives an urgent call from a customer, it has no information about the company and the person with whom it is dealing. However the Sales Team knows whether the urgent call is from a large account or a small account. They also have information about whether the person who has called is an Engineer or the CEO of the company. Information is available but is not shared at the right moment with the customer support department.

Although many small companies are information rich, it is disorganised and not available for the right person at right moment.

In any medium sized business,  you will see one of these scenarios

1.  When a Sales Person leaves the organization, he takes with him lot of information about customers and his interaction with them. All the business cards, promises made to customers, discounts given and follow up communication etc. all of this information may not have been transferred to the replacement. It is quite common in medium businesses that sales people leave for better prospects. With every Sales Person who leaves there is an information drain.

2.  As the company moves from Small Business to Medium Business, senior people who were managing the sales and small sales force are forced to handle more sales and larger sales teams. But they are not given enough tools to migrate from a small team to large team. This essentially makes managing and monitoring the sales force quite a challenging task in medium businesses.

CRM is an application that enables companies to manage customer interaction at one place and maintain a bigger sales force through sales force automation.

Traditional Contact Management Systems

Most of us are familiar with one or more simple contact management systems such as Microsoft Outlook ACT! Or Mozilla Thunderbird.  Microsoft Outlook, is one of the widely used email client. It also acts as a contact manager.  Outlook can be used to store both personal and business contacts. For each contact person you can store phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses and personal information like birthday, anniversary etc. It can also store information like the organization for which he is working'

If you need to store information of another person from the same organization, Outlook provides copying facility for replicating company information. If the company moves to a new location or the company contact number changes, since the information is duplicated, you have to go to each person of the company to change the relevant information.

And similarly another employee is interacting with that organization, even he needs to go and change the company information.

In Microsoft Outlook there is no attempt to automatically link upcoming meetings, telephone calls or tasks with the contact or account to which these activities are related, or to keep an organized history of the past account activity including emails and notes.

A CRM or a Customer Relationship Management System is a system that manages information and processes around your relationship with your customers, not only the sales aspect of that relationship but also the ongoing service and support aspects. The system should provide at least basic information about the companies you are doing business with, and the people you work with at those companies. Typically these are referred to as Accounts and Contacts. Accounts can be your customers, vendors, partners or your sub contractors.

Typically CRMs are web based and do not require any software installation for users. Once the CRM is installed on the server or hosted on the internet, the users need only a browser like Internet Explorer and Internet connection.

One of the minimum features offered by a CRM is that the company or account information is kept at one place and if a change is made at one place it is replicated everywhere and for everyone.  All the contact persons related to the company are linked, so that latest information is percolated to everyone in the company.

All the meetings, tasks and schedules are maintained at one point and can be shared across the departments and employees.

History of the interaction with the customer is stored on a central location where the company has a control over instead of individual employees.

These features like maintaining account records separate from contact records and maintaining account and account history are two of the fundamental features you should expect to see in any CRM, but there are many more features including

1.  Sales force automation: this includes lead capture and the promotion of leads to sales opportunities

2.  Opportunity tracking: this tracks the sales stage and percentage likelihood.

3.  Sales pipeline tracking: this uses graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it.

4.  Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities

5. Service case tracking: There are also other service/support capabilities such as tracking software bugs, and managing support contract renewals.

6.  Corporate Calendar management:  for arranging meetings.

7.  Corporate Directory:  for contacting fellow employees.

8.  And many more features and customization facilities.

Open Source SugarCRM and Affordability for Small and Medium Businesses

Until recently, small and medium businesses typically could not afford technologies of this type and even when they could, those technologies were more oriented towards larger businesses and were impractical and unwieldy.

However lot of open source CRM products have come to the market which have no fixed license cost and lot more open to customising it to any organization.

SugarCRM is a commercial open source solution where basic CRM functionality is available in the Open Source version. And some complex features are offered by the commercial version. Small and medium businesses can start using SugarCRM Open Soruce version and fine tune their customer relationship management processes and automate their sales force.

Open Source SugarCRM solutions are being offered by many software companies which provide installation, maintenance and customization services. 

Ram Kumar Lanka is the CEO of Rhea Technologies which specializing in providing software products and solutions for small businesses. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 Issue BG73 Apr07

Related Items:

---

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.