Customer Relationship Management

Managing a website used to be about putting out a message. But now it is about managing people, possibly millions of them. The nirvana is to provide a login for each visitor (so the site knows exactly who they are) so the site can customize itself to each as an individual and provide them with communication, archival and research tools and that automatically keep their profiles up to date and accumulate information about them. It also provides your administration personnel with the ability to link up visitors to accounts, invoices, quotes, etc.

The people database of a website is its centerpiece in that it involves the most time, contains the most valuable information and connects with almost every other aspect. Leveraging website-accumulated people information presents the most potential for growth and success of your venture.

There are many issues to deal with in the design and everyday use of your CRM system (Customer Resource Management or Customer Relationship Management). These include avoidance of redundancy and duplication of information, integration issues with the login, sales and other parts of the site, staying in touch, keeping information up-to-date, security, categorization and communication with large numbers of people, etc. It is difficult to imagine a more important part of your dreamsite. It is also difficult to imagine that any product out there could possibly fit your unique needs.

Lets discuss what a people system should be like from both a visitor and administration point of view.

Visitor

When someone logs into a people-smart site it knows who they are and can bring the whole history of their past visits into play to customize their experience and make it as easy as possible. It should also give them a sense that they are a participant in the maintenance of information about them, have control over what is maintained and have easy access to your staff regarding this. Consider, for example, when visitors have unique rights to see information or download files. After a login it should not be necessary to concern them with any further passwords or security, the things they have a right to see or get should be freely available to them.

Stay tuned, more to come...

Administration

Most pages on your site should have a header that provides a quick search into your people system. There should be links in all parts of the sites to automatically visit the account of the person connected to the information being viewed.

Stay tuned, more to come...

CRM Software Products?

Many are available and they do things in so many different ways. When you choose one of these you are really really taking a leap of faith because all of your people data will be in their hands. If they take the software down a path that does not work with your business they take your data also (and the time invested to enter it). A custom CRM system that starts simple is much better, we can create one for you. Another possible approach is to start with an open source product and customise that. vTiger is a wonderful example, it is open source and free to try (an inexpensive to register). It is a WAMP product. When you download and install it it creates a web and SQL server right on your computer and you have your own one-machine internet (of course other machines in your office can be configured to talk to the server on your computer). vTiger is also a wonderful example of how your needs are likely different that what it provides! Contact us if you want to customize vTiger or fix a problem.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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