Customer Relationship Management: The Open Source Way

The CRM domain is dominated by Oracle and SAP in the commercial offerings sector. However, there are a large array of open source CRM applications that give SME companies a more flexible (read cheaper) access to CRM functionality. Some of the open source CRM applications include SugarCRM, SplendidCRM, CentricCRM and VTiger CRM.  Among these, SugarCRM is my personal favorite and by far the most popular open source CRM offering.

SugarCRM Dashboard

Based on PHP and MySql, SugarCRM provides all the advanced features available in any commercial CRM software. There are four main entities in the SugarCRM system.

Account: An account is any customer organization/company that you are or will do business with.

Contact: Contacts are people that you are or will be communicating with. Contacts can be independent or be associated with your accounts.

Opportunities: This represents any sales or commercial prospect you might have with an account.

Lead: A lead is a potential prospect that you want to follow but has not yet become a Contact or Account.

Initially your customer will be entered as a Lead. Once the lead develops, it can be converted into Contact or an Account. An Account can have multiple Contacts and Opportunities.  There is also a notion of Activity such as Meeting, Email, Call, and Task that can be associated with either of the entities described above (Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity).  Hence while viewing an Account you can get a good understanding of all the contacts & opportunities associated with it along with the history of activities such as meetings and follow-up calls actioned or planned with that account.

To add to the functionality, SugarCRM allows you to create marketing campaigns such as email or newsletter campaigns. All leads, accounts, and opportunities can be linked with a particular campaign allowing you to measure the ROI of that marketing campaign. If you are interested in the domain of Customer Service, SugarCRM also allows you to create and track issues (cases) and bugs. These issues and bugs can also be linked to Accounts giving you a complete 360 view into you customer history.

The community (free) edition of the software provides all the above functionality along with some basic reporting. However, the commercial version offers some additional features and a more advanced reporting. Additionally, the SugarExchange platform offers a wide array of third-party created modules further increasing the value-add of SugarCRM