Customer Relationship Management
I’ve been looking into setting up some kind of Customer Relationship Management(CRM) workflow for my business.
There are lots of options out there.
Salesforce is the leading online solution, but it’s overkill for what I need. As is the free, open-source SugarCRM
I like another online solution – Highrise by 37signals. It is intuitively designed, highly functional and does everything I need. But the useful version, for me, costs $49 per month. That’s $600 per year. I can’t justify that for my business.
I’ll probably end up doing something in a spreadsheet for now, and tie that in with my Google Calendar and email. Eventually I’d like to build a web app to manage my clients and leads but for now a spreadsheet will do.
I’m not alone in not having a system setup yet. Though I can be forgiven as I only deal with a few customers each month.
However my mobile phone company Three has no excuse. They’re one of the biggest telecom companies in the world. Yet when I called them last night regarding an ongoing issue with my handset I had to give them all the details of the problem again. They even wanted me to run the same diagnostics again. It didn’t work a week ago and the phone had since been for repair with Three. Why did the think that doing a reset again would fix the problem?
The answer.
Poor, or no, Customer Relationship Management.