In this chapter we introduced the topic of Customer Relationship Management, and touched upon a number of important points:
CRM applications have been evolving rapidly since the late 1990’s, and are now delivering on their promise of enhancing business profitability, improving customer satisfaction and levels of service, and streamlining business processes.
CRM applications, once highly priced, are now affordable even for smaller businesses.
Smaller businesses typically have an administrative staff that is overloaded with work, and yet there is constant pressure to cut administrative costs.
Most small businesses employ business systems that are not accessible outside the office, acting as a force that limits business communication with outbound workers, and tends to keep business managers in the office.
Web-based CRM systems can lower administrative workloads and costs, and are accessible from PCs, laptops, and handheld PDA/mobile phones—anywhere, anytime.
Contact management systems such as Outlook, ACT! and Goldmine are not CRMs, and lack many fundamental features of leading CRMs.
SugarCRM is a web-based CRM introduced in 2004, available as a free Open Source version, or as a commercial Pro- or Enterprise-level version.
Like many top CRMs, SugarCRM is quick and easy to use, making access to customer information a natural and even pleasant experience.
For the smaller business, there are many valid CRM choices: NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, and SalesLogix among them. We have chosen SugarCRM Open Source as our example CRM for this book as it is free, and contains most of the latest features that make CRM adoption so compelling for small and medium businesses.
CRMs may be deployed as On-Demand web-based services, as application software to be installed on your own servers, or as server appliances delivered pre‑loaded and ready to run. The choice is yours, and involves some tradeoffs between cost and convenience.
To truly deliver on their promises, CRM systems typically must be customized to suit your business. There are several levels of complexity to this customization, and the most recent CRMs help you do quite a bit of it yourself, rather than paying for expensive computer services staff to do it for you.
CRMs can help you track the sales performance of your business more closely with less work, see the future more clearly, and plan more effectively.
This book will take you through the entire process of determining your CRM needs, implementing and installing a CRM, getting your data into the CRM, rolling it out to your business and training staff, and customizing the CRM to maximize your business benefits.
Throughout this book, we will follow the experiences of Doc Newhart, and his fictional business, RayDoc. The tales of his experiences here are taken from the real-life experiences of multiple CRM installations within smaller businesses.
In the next chapter, we will use the knowledge you have gained about CRM systems to begin to analyze your own business, identify its CRM needs, and understand what to look for in a CRM and its customization and configuration capabilities.