Managing Your Customers with CRM Software

My good buddy recently sent me an email bragging about an Intranet solution for managing your customers. Best of all, it’s an Open Source project so the price is $0. :)

The product is called vTiger CRM and these are its main strengths:

• Sales force Automation (orders, potentials, leads, contacts, etc.)
• Marketing Automation (campaigns, leads, etc.)
• Customer Support & Service (FAQs, trouble tickets, etc.)
• Order Management (sales, purchase, etc.)
• Inventory Management (products, vendors, etc.)
• Analytics & Reports (sales, inventory, leads, tickets, quotes, etc.)
  and much more…
  

After reading more about the product, I decided to install it on my home PC. My first impression is that the program is very polished, intuitive and powerful. I can see our company using something like this to really keep us ahead of the competition.
The best thing about vTiger is its Intranet-based architecture. Just install it on a PC with a web server (Apache, IIS, etc.), and the MySQL database. Personally, I would install it on Ubuntu Linux (free) with Windows Server 2003 as my second option.
You can start using the product’s many CRM (Customer Relationship Management) features by pointing your web browser to the correct internal URL from any desktop PC in the office.
After an employee logs in with their user id and password, she will be taken to a personal dashboard (see attached image) where she has access to everything (campaigns, trouble tickets, leads, quotes, orders, etc.) about her customers.
Right now, I don’t think there’s another application like vTiger here in Kenya. I look forward to writing more about this powerful Intranet application after I spend a little more time with it.

By the way, is your company using a CRM application?