Browser Based Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed to help users consolidate their key contact details, while at the same time helping them to manage everyday work processes such as liasing with clients, managing jobs, assigning tasks, scheduling appointments and collating information. Furthermore BrowserCRM, around which this article is based, will accommodate additional users who can have permission based access to share and collaborate in a workgroup environment. For these users groupware facilities such as a knowledgebase and internal memo facility are also available.

BrowserCRM Basics:
Contacts (Company and Personal) are linked to the following modules:

• Jobs
• Tasks
• Notes
• Appointments
• Opportunities
• Mail
• Files

To access this information a [Contact] is called up and tabs for all of the above linked information is available on a single screen. Note also that an email client is built directly into BrowserCRM.

Managing work with BrowserCRM can be particularly effective for the increasing number of businesses that have a remote workforce. If you haven't had experience with this type of application before though it can sometimes be difficult to understand the concepts, and how they can be applied to a real world situation.

The following article illustrates the essential concepts behind BrowserCRM with a simple scenario. Where activities relate to a module within BrowserCRM they are shown within square brackets e.g. [Tasks]
 
Jane's Agency: a case study

Jane logs in to BrowserCRM and checks her email as she regularly does with BrowserCRM's [Mail] function. An email comes in with an enquiry from Peter Pan of Pan Demic. Jane is able to attend to the enquiry but additional information Peter included in his email alerted her to a possible further [Opportunity]. As Jane hasn't dealt with Peter before she clicks on the “create contact” link next to the email and adds those details she currently has for Pan Demic to the [Company Contact], and enters Peter Pan's details as the [Personal Contact] linked to the Company, Pan Demic.

As a result of Peter Pan's enquiry Jane sets up two further entries: one is an [Opportunity] to remind her to introduce Peter to an additional service she offers that he may not be aware of, and the other is a [Task] to track the main subject of Peter's enquiry. These are both linked to the [Company Contact] for Pan Demic.

When the task has been completed Jane calls up Pan Demic, flags the [Task] as completed and before she notifies Peter using the [Mail] facility she is also reminded by the [Opportunities] module that there was something else she wanted to raise with him. This she does, and then to complete the activity she sets a reminder on the [Calendar] to follow up in a week if she hasn't heard back from Peter.

Well,  as is sometimes the case, Jane did follow up the following week, but to no avail.

Six months later Jane was attending an Interstate conference. In the evening she took the opportunity to log in to her BrowserCRM account at the hotel's Internet kiosk. Among the emails is one from Peter Pan, who she hasn't heard from for months. Peter wants Jane to phone, so she does so immediately – with the entire history of her previous communications with him right there in front of her.

As a result of this phone call they arranged to meet. Straight away Jane entered the appointment into BrowserCRM's [Appointment] module and set a reminder alarm. She also entered a [Note] of the conversation and set up a new [Task] to cover the specific actions she had to see to in preparation for their meeting.

One of the things she had to prepare however was going to be rather tight. In fact work needed to start on it before she returned from the convention. To enable this to happen she assigned [View] and [Edit] permissions to a co-worker back at the office, who was also a BrowserCRM user, and sent him a [Memo] instructing him to access Pan Demic's entries and get started on the work right away.

This time the meeting with Peter Pan went well. So well in fact that it resulted in Jane being able to secure a sizeable contract. Naturally Jane now set up BrowserCRM to allow her to organise and track the tasks involved. But she also did one more thing. As Peter wanted to be kept informed of the progress of the work, Jane set up a protected public view of his [Job] with viewing access assigned to Peter. This meant that at any time he could log on at a time that suited him and check the latest progress notes of his [Job]. 


In summary, an Internet based CRM such as BrowserCRM has the following benefits:

• It allows users immediate access to their contact and contact related information wherever there is an Internet connection.
• It allows workgroups to collaborate on jobs regardless of whether they are located in the same office or not. Shared calendars, knowledgebases, an internal memo system and the ability to assign tasks to different members of the workgroup all assist with this.
• It enables system users to always have a client's complete history available whenever they contact their clients – or more importantly, when their clients contact them without prior notice.
• It allow clients to be granted viewing access to their job's progress.