Best web-hosted CRM program ?
Discussion
Im looking for a client relationship management program for my company.
It needs to be web hosted (I think) because I want it to be accessible from anywhere by anyone in the company.
Ive been looking at Intrabench but to me its not easy to use, uses US jargon and is slightly counter intuitive. Especially if youve ever used Fastrack (for recruitment), which is brilliant.
Does anyone have experience of these and have any recomendations?
A user friendly interface is more important than how many features it has, as we will only use the more basic functions anyway. More for recording and sharing knowledge than anything but the ability to email and text via the system would be good.
Cheers for any suggestions
It needs to be web hosted (I think) because I want it to be accessible from anywhere by anyone in the company.
Ive been looking at Intrabench but to me its not easy to use, uses US jargon and is slightly counter intuitive. Especially if youve ever used Fastrack (for recruitment), which is brilliant.
Does anyone have experience of these and have any recomendations?
A user friendly interface is more important than how many features it has, as we will only use the more basic functions anyway. More for recording and sharing knowledge than anything but the ability to email and text via the system would be good.
Cheers for any suggestions
We run Salesforce for one business unit, and SugarCRM in another (I use Salesforce personally). I keep hearing great things about Sugar, in particular the way it seems to be a better overall package (including, for example, issue tracking against clients) than Salesforce. We may well move over to it when time permits.
It has to be Salesforce.com.
Ok, it might not be exactly what some organisations are looking for, but my god, if you integrate it, its fabulous. I have used it at two different companies now and its been well embedded into the operations of both. What it does mean is that you have visibility of virtually everything (if you want it).
In comparison to old client-server CRM solutions, its like night and day. The big thing of SF.COM is that its so flexible for integration options. To give you an idea, we fully integrate our quoting process - so a sales person can generate a quote (online or offline by the way) and the full information is uploaded against that account and contact in SF.COM. Its all done through Excel spreadsheets and it dumps the contents into a PDF file!
Sounds really complex, but its fabulous for sales management (can see exactly what is happening and where) and its great for the sales people as they simply cannot get it wrong. The process is not as fixed and rigid as it might sound and pretty much all sales people like the fact that it saves them probably 30mins - 60mins per quote....
Not bad, but be warned though, its not cheap.
Ok, it might not be exactly what some organisations are looking for, but my god, if you integrate it, its fabulous. I have used it at two different companies now and its been well embedded into the operations of both. What it does mean is that you have visibility of virtually everything (if you want it).
In comparison to old client-server CRM solutions, its like night and day. The big thing of SF.COM is that its so flexible for integration options. To give you an idea, we fully integrate our quoting process - so a sales person can generate a quote (online or offline by the way) and the full information is uploaded against that account and contact in SF.COM. Its all done through Excel spreadsheets and it dumps the contents into a PDF file!
Sounds really complex, but its fabulous for sales management (can see exactly what is happening and where) and its great for the sales people as they simply cannot get it wrong. The process is not as fixed and rigid as it might sound and pretty much all sales people like the fact that it saves them probably 30mins - 60mins per quote....
Not bad, but be warned though, its not cheap.
SugarCRM is basically a Salesforce.com clone, but is effectively open-source code. This means that you can either get a Sugar VAR to deploy and host an implementation for you, or take the code yourself and customise it as you please. It's got a very cost-effective licensing model too. I've deployed it as part of client CRM solutions before and it seemed to work pretty well.
Proviso as always - if your business process model can be supported effectively by the tool you're planning to use then great. If not, then one or the other will have to change, and there WILL be pain!
Proviso as always - if your business process model can be supported effectively by the tool you're planning to use then great. If not, then one or the other will have to change, and there WILL be pain!
Some good links here. Although I don't actually use it; I've heard nothing but good things about Salesforce:
http://blog.increasecrm.co.uk/2008/05/whos-who-of-...
http://blog.increasecrm.co.uk/2008/05/whos-who-of-...
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