Tracking customer requirements

Attendees

Simon Hettrick (facilitator), Mario Antonioletti (scribe), Philipp Wieder, Clare, Steve Lee, Tim Parkinson, Neil Chue Hong, Gillian Sinclair, Tiejun Ma

Overview

Customer Relationship Management systems - and, more precisely, the need to find an effective system - were discussed in this session. The discussion was based on the attendees' experiences.

Conclusion

Everyone agreed on the importance of a good CRM. However, experiences were not in general very positive. Most organisations had trialled at least one system.

A discussion about the discipline needed to use a CRM came to the conclusion that, if people are to use a CRM, they need to see the benefit. To get a system to work, it was agreed that the most important thing was to lower the data-entry level so that people will use it.

People wanted a CRM that could fulfil the following needs:

• Tracking/Audit trails/Knowledge base
• Sharing information
• Actions/Tasks lists
• Contact lists
• Calendaring
• Different views by organisation/user/etc.
• Integrate with other tooling, such as calendars/mail/etc.

The systems that had been used were:

• Highrise – have to buy an account ($49/month for 15 user)
• SugarCRM – is free to use, but takes a long time to set-up and can be too sales orientated
• Zimbra - generally a positive view on this system, although it is designed more for email/calendaring than CRM
• Footprints - need to maintain the address book
• vtiger – open source/contact management
• RT - for dealing with queries

Further work

• There may be some room for collaboration between OMII-UK and the NGS to customise SugarCRM - or a similar, customisable system - for both organisations.

• OMII-UK will investigate Zimbra and Mantis (a system that no one had used, but one person had heard was promising).