Customer Relationship Management

Whether you manage a web site with just a few advertisers or are a store owner with many locations, keeping track of the people that provide your revenue — your customers — is a critical aspect of your business. From pre-sales to technical support, constantly measuring customer satisfaction assesses the appeal of your products, gauges the effectiveness of your staff, and can help guide business decisions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software facilitates, captures, and analyzes the varied relationships between a business and its customers. Used as part of an overall business and sales strategy, CRM can boost efficiency, yield more intelligence, shore up weaknesses, and improve what you already do best.

This month, let’s look at what CRM software can do and investigate a compelling open source solution that suits any budget.

As you might imagine, software that manages customers — from acquisition to retention — can be quite expansive, reflecting the many ways that a business must interact with customers. A complete CRM package is likely to include:

*Sales force automation to manage prospects, automate workflow, manage accounts, and keep track of events.

*Marketing automation to manage ad campaigns, transmit email newsletters, and manage and measure lead conversions.

*Information management to control revisions of documentation and to distribute corporate and product literature.

*Contract management to securely manage existing contracts, help generate and record new contracts, and alert sales staff when contracts are up for renewal.