Small Business and CRM Programs

In the world of business, customer relationship management is a crucial aspect of everything. Without customers, the business would fail. Without happy customers, the business is certainly doomed. That is why it is so important that the business have ways to ensure the satisfaction of the customer while simultaneously recording and keeping track of everything about them (such as their information, call record, etc.) Not only that, but CRM software can be used for surveys, polls, and promotions and well.

Customer relationship management can take several different approaches that can all contribute to the business as a whole. For example, several of these approaches could be: Customer service, Campaign management, and Sales force automation. These programs can do a variety of tasks in each of these areas such as storing contact information (thus making customers call much easier since the information is already in the system), designing targeted marketing campaigns, storing and analyzing campaign results, the sharing of customer information between different departments in the same business, and even incorporate social networking into the program.

There a numerous CRM programs available, with three of the most well known being: Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Salesforce: This system is one that records each step in the sales process. It also has a contact management system that keeps track of each time the customer is contacted, why, and possible follow-up. One of its most useful aspects is the fact that it ensures that the customer is not contacted numerous times (thus causing complaints). Some other aspects of these programs can include sales forecasting, order management, and product knowledge. An increasingly popular feature is one that allows the customer to custom design the product of their choosing to meet their specifications. This is becoming used more and more in the automobile and the computer industry. Since there are such a wide variety of functions that the Salesforce programs can be used for, it is often necessary to implement them throughout all departments in order to ensure cohesiveness of the whole company.

SugarCRM: This program comes in four editions; Community edition, express, professional, and enterprise. The community edition is free and the company offers subscriptions to the professional and enterprise editions. What makes this program so different than most of the other CRM programs out there is that it is an open source program. Not only that, it is also based on the LAMP software stack (those being Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Some of the key features are the ability to set up administration, the automation of sales force, tracking sales opportunities, maintain customer information, create advanced reports, create calendars, determine quotes and invoices, and even maintain email campaigns.

Microsoft Dynamic CRM: This program is obviously a product of Microsoft and is accessed by clients via Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is possible to access it through other internet browsers, but these methods produce mixed results and are not recommended by Microsoft. There are four editions of this program: Professional, Enterprise, Service Provider, and the Workgroup edition. Some of the benefits of this program are that it is both multi-lingual and multi-currency capable. This program also sports powerful import tools which is useful when transferring information between other programs.