SutiCRM: Customer Relationship Management Software Solutions

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Submitted by sutisoft on

Customer Relationship Management is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about it as computer software with a large database populated with customer-related information. Its primary purpose is to organize, track, and automate key aspects of an organization's sales activities.

This leads to higher customer loyalty and retention, more efficient sales and marketing efforts, lower expenses, more effective call center operations, additional opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and while CRM does refer to a program to manage customer information the better CRM software does much more than that.  CRM Software not only allows the organizing of customer information, but CRM software also provides the means to track sales leads from the time they are obtained until the sales are closed.

Customer Engagement Systems: Adapting Digital Strategies to Retain Customers and Improve Sales

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Submitted by EPiServer on

At a time when consumers have increasingly high expectations for website content, site owners need to pull out all the stops when creating an engaging experience for their visitors. This may include social networking features, multimedia, interactive features like polls and contests, and of course, fresh content that changes frequently. And these features need to be easy to add to a site (and change often) without constant intervention from the IT department.

The trouble is that all-in-one solutions for online customer engagement are thin on the ground. For the most part, the various functions that a site owner needs to deploy for customer engagement – such as analytics, social networking, and content management – are found in separate solutions, creating software management headaches for site owners.

Why is customer engagement so critical for today’s site owners? In a still-recovering economic climate, websites can’t afford to lose customers who show up on the home page, only to lose interest and leave when they’re not drawn in by compelling content. Engaged customers will download information and submit their contact information, which fills the lead-generation pipeline. They’ll buy products, they’ll stay longer, and they’ll come back again and again.

You need to adapt your digital strategies to meet the high expectations of the consumers, and the requirements of your business, to make as many customer interactions succeed. Ideally, customer engagement systems contain the following functions if they are to achieve the goals of retaining customers and improving sales:

Tools to streamline marketing campaigns:  Marketing and sales departments shouldn’t need to enlist technical people every time they need to launch a new campaign, or shift gears on a current campaign. Nontechnical users should be able to easily create campaigns and monitor their progress.

TioLive SaaS completes implementation of the largest customer support application in Ireland

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Submitted by Elodie on

TioLive, the Open Source ERP/CRM Software as a Service (SaaS), announced the successful implementation of the largest mission critical customer support application in Ireland.

Dover (USA), Paris (France), Dublin (Ireland) - June, 7th 2010  - TioLive LLC, the company behind the Open Source ERP/CRM software has just announced that the implementation of TioLive CRM in a critical environment in Ireland is a complete success. While Bet'Eire Flow was preparing the launch of the fully automated Barrier Free Tolling System for the M50 motorway around Dublin, TioLive had been chosen to complete Bet'Eire Flow's core business management application with a ready to use, on demand CRM system focused on Customer Support. The challenge has been to provide a turn-key system allowing to track contacts and manage the front and backoffice assistance processes for 500.000 customers.

Christian Copin, Bet'Eire Flow General Manager says, "Our fully automated Free Flow Tolling Service was a world first. When we started, we knew that the number of users of the CRM would be high but we weren't sure about how much. Moreover we couldn't evaluate precisely the number of customer requests. Today we have around 250 people in a call center which are using TioLive and they have been able to handle the 2.000 mails and 15.000 phone calls received each day at the system launch."

Thierry Brettnacher, Nexedi/TioLive Project Director adds, "Thanks to TioLive adaptability, the software has been fully customized to the customer needs. Validation workflows have been configured so that the headquarters of Bet'Eire Flow keep an overall control on written correspondence sent to customer. We also deployed a template management system to speed up the process of responding to the customer requests. Once, the customer support modules were in place, the use of TioLive has been extended inside Bet'Eire Flow to other business fields such as financial or project management."

Jean-Paul Smets, TioLive CEO concludes, "This implementation shows that TioLive is not only suitable for SMEs but also for large and critical applications. We have had to face an important growth of the company and an intensive use of the platform 7/7 since one year. With no major failure, we proved the reliability of our technologies."

KnowledgeTree, SugarCRM and iNet Process Announce Integration

Solution makes KnowledgeTree documents accessible from within SugarCRM

RALEIGH, NC — December 9, 2009 — KnowledgeTree®, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software, SugarCRM, the world's leading provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, and iNet Process, a European provider of ECM and CRM services, today announced the commercial release of iNetDocs, an application that enables seamless integration between KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM.

With iNetDocs, documents and folders in the KnowledgeTree repository can be searched, browsed and retrieved from within SugarCRM and attached to all of the main modules within the CRM application, including leads, opportunities, contacts and accounts. A tab in the SugarCRM interface acts as a window directly into the repository.

According to Lionel Fernandes, manager at iNet Process, “iNetDocs turns SugarCRM into a complete workspace for the busy CRM professional. It is now possible to conduct most of the day’s work without ever leaving the SugarCRM application. This integration ensures greater collaboration and compliance by incorporating document access and control right into CRM business processes.”

dotCMS 1.5.1 - Open Source CMS, Web CRM and eCommerce

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Submitted by Bryan on

Since dotCMS is a "new" CMS that we're focusing on, I'm needing to add some content. This was announced a couple weeks ago, but still worthy of posting if you're trying to catch up like we are on what dotCMS is all about.

dotCMS 1.5.1 released – Open Source CMS, Web CRM and eCommerce - Dotmarketing released dotCMS 1.5.1 today which provides over a 150 fixes and improvements to a feature rich, open-source J2EE enterprise class web content management system.

New features included in this version of dotCMS are:

dotCMS 1.5 Now Available!

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Submitted by Bryan on
This is one of my first posts on dotCMS 1.5, so "long-time" dotCMS users feel free to correct me if I get anything wrong here.  Earlier this month, dotCMS 1.5 was released.  dotCMS is an open source Java based CMS geared toward toward the enterprise with Web customer resource resource management (CRM) and eCommerce, and business intelligence.

New features included in dotCMS 1.5:
  • Content "Triggers" using JBoss Rules to allow rule based user segmentation by usage.
  • Business Intelligence Reports - Integrated with Jasper Reports and iReports allow detailed and customized reporting on site usage, transactions and content activity.
  • Improvements to User Search Segmentation, Permissions and Management.
  • Revamped Campaign/Communication Manager.
  • Web based communications can delivered to a segment of site visitors as a campaign.
  • Updated User Interface.
  • Taxonomy (Tagging) Improvements
  • Quartz based job scheduler.
For the original announcement on the release of dotCMS 1.5, please visit dotCMS News.  You can also download dotCMS  via the project's download page.

CiviCRM Blog: Announcing CiviCRM v1.7

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Submitted by Bryan on
CivicCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:
  • Integrated online event registration and management for paid and free events. This release also includes a new "Contact Dashboard", which gives constituents a consolidated view of their subscriptions, contributions, event registrations and more.
  • Create and save re-usable email templates (with mail-merge tokens)
  • CiviContribute plugins for Authorize.net and Google Checkout
  • Use customized versions of templates for any screen
  • One-click copying for existing Profiles, Contribution Pages and Events
  • Restrict access to selected custom data fields and selected profile screens
Complete Story

CiviCRM 1.5 released

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Submitted by Bryan on

I should have put something out about the new version of CivicCRM (1.5) last week, but it got buried with other priorities. My apologies to all the CivicCRM fans out there. I have not loaded CivicCRM myself, but my understanding is that CivicCRM is now based on the Drupal 4.7 code.

For those that do not recognize what CRM stands for, try customer relationship management at Wikipedia. Here is how CivicCRM describes the software in their announcement:

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent
relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based,
internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of
advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

New features and enhancements you can expect in CivicCRM 1.5 include:

  • A new membership management component
  • Search Builder - a new tool for building complex search queries
  • Significant memory and speed optimizations

CivicSpace: CiviCRM 1.5 Skypecast July 06, 12:00 PST

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Submitted by Bryan on

 

"CiviCRM Community Skypecast will provide an overview of the new features in CiviCRM 1.5. July 06, 12:00 PST

Learn about features coming in v1.5. Ask questions, and share feedback, ideas, tips for using CiviCRM with other users, developers and folks from the CiviCRM core development team. (CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.)"

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IT Quote of the Week

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Submitted by Bryan on

Most of us in IT are aware of the recent data thefts of personal information within the United States government. Over the past couple weeks the VA admitted that files containing personal data for more than 50,000 active duty and more than 26 million veterans was stolen. In related news it was also reported that the "Energy Department disclosed to Congress on Friday that it suffered a security breach from a hacker in September that compromised 1,500 personnel records". With these two news stories fresh in our minds, we have chosen an opinion piece by Frank Hayes as this week's IT Quote of the Week:

Too many of our business processes are just as messy as the VA's. For years, we've collected data via the Web or by using customer relationship management systems, much of it data that we don't need, don't keep proper track of and haven't properly secured...As we watch the VA's fiasco continue to unfold, we're in no position to feel superior or complacent. That could be us.

-Frank Hayes, Number Control, Computerworld