Managing contacts can be a challenging task for any business but with a proper Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) such as vTiger; managing customers is as easy as ABC. Customers in case of a CRM is a very general term used for any individual/organisation who have had any dealing with you. They are not only those who have bought product/service from you but also your suppliers, visitors to your physical store or even people coming at the reception of your office or people coming to your website; they all are considered customers when talking with a CRM application in view.
When you are comparing CRM applications for your business make sure that the CRM application is not just customer centric but has a global approach of managing your dealings with individuals and organisations.
The most basic feature of a CRM application is management of contact information. Contacts usually have a first name, last name, email address, phone number, mobile number (some time multiple), address etc. You should be able to define other information about your contacts. E.g. if you are a restaurant you may want to store the information that which of your customers are allergic to a particular food.
These contacts/individuals are usually working for an organisation (generally referred as Accounts). These accounts have a business name, phone number (mostly multiple), email address, website address, company registration number, vat number etc.
Some of these Accounts may be customers and Suppliers/Vendors as well. The only difference being that you may owe money to them.
These Accounts and Contacts may fall into different categories such as Competitor, Partner etc. Depending on the needs of the business you may need to have various other categories of contacts.
You should be communicating with these contacts on a regular basis and you may want the history of your communication with these contacts to be easily available from the CRM; irrelevant to the fact that the communication was over the phone or email or a meeting.
These are the basic features of any CRM application be it vTiger or CiviCRM or SugarCRM. Depending on what type of business you are the other features can be different. e.g. Sales Force Management, Trouble Ticket Management, Service Contract Management, Invoicing, Quotations, Product & Stock Management, Membership Management, Event Management etc.
Target Integration provides consultancy on a perfect CRM application for your specific industry. We have worked with businesses in retail, manufacturing, software development, service providers, clubs, non profit organisations and associations to provide them their suitable CRM application. Talk to us today and we should be able to help you with your specific needs.
