We are a software company selling software products on our website. And we want to have a CRM system to maintenance all information about the customers(such as the name, address, phone, email address) and their orders(such as order ID, tracking ID, purchase method, etc.). The detailed requirements are:
1. Has a web-based interface for the administrator, the staff members and the customers.
2. Has a background database, such as MySQL database, contains all the information about the customers and their orders. And we can add additional fields according to different requirements.
3. The administrator can login via the web interface and perform all the administration tasks, including add/update/remove/search customer records, add/remove staff members and set their privileges which define the operations they can do on the CRM system.
4. The staff members can login via the web interface and perform the tasks according to their privileges set by the administrator.
5. The customer can login via the web interface, which is called "Customer Area" or "Member Area", where he can review or update his profile(personal information, such as name, address, phone, email, etc.), review his order information, re-download the software product he has purchased in the past, access the customer-only technical support service, renew his subscription to technical support service, and purchase an upgrade of the software product if he want.
6. Can add customer data to the background database automatically via a form or GET/POST methods.
7. Support to import customer data in XML format.
Does anyone know a CRM system support all these features? Thanks.
Alan Chen
MyCustomer.com 30-Dec-2007
Story read 1129 times
As per Darren, I'm not completely up to speed on all of the products available. If you develop your own software then SugarCRM is defintiely an option, although Concursive's Concourse suite may be closer to your full spec.
Depending on whether you want to host your own database, then the on-demad products such as salesforce and RightNow should fit the bill.
I'm also reasonably confident that Microsoft CRM v 4.0 is due to have web accessibility, although I'm a little hazy on the details.
Hope that helps - it should certainly be a good starting point!
Cheers
Tom
The degree of control and access you want to your CRM system is certainly not an unusual requirement - I'm guessing that a free open source product that you can develop yourselves might be a strong contender (do you develop as well as sell software?). Sugar is one that springs to mind, but no doubt there are dozens of options out there that give you web browser access to admin and to the database.
I'm sure other MyCustomer.com members will have been in a similar situation - any advice anyone?
Cheers for now, and good luck with your CRM project!
Darren Falkingham
Head of Marketing
Sift Media
CRM