CRM

The world is going mobile. This isn't exactly a big revelation, but by adopting smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, businesses are changing the way they operate, and the changes are only expected to keep coming with the development of wearable technology. Perhaps one of the biggest ways the business landscape is transforming is through the increased use of customer relationship management (CRM) software. Companies have used CRM for years, but it has exploded in popularity only recently, and much of that is thanks to CRM businesses embracing mobile technology.

When it comes to tools that can help businesses reach out to more and more people, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are some of the most important currently being used. In a nutshell, CRM systems help companies keep track of customer information, with automation and organization of data being crucial elements of the software. As technology has evolved, so have CRM systems. Every year brings about new advances, and businesses have needed to adapt to keep up with all the changes. Predicting what’s to come can help organizations prepare in advance. As companies look to the future, they’ll notice several trends that they can be ready for well ahead of the rest of the pack.

MindTouch, a company dedicated to creating self-service help experiences, announced today that its social help system now integrates with SalesForce.com Help Desk and support ticketing to dramatically improve support agents’ efficiency and customers’ help experiences. MindTouch believes their social help platform is revolutionizing the user manual and SaaS customer experiences through a web-based environment that includes a knowledge base, help center, ticketing integration, and help button.

Support agents using CRM and web-based support ticketing systems have instant access to MindTouch powered help articles and knowledge base assets, thereby speeding time to resolution for customer issues. For support agents using SalesForce.com, MindTouch enables them to quickly pinpoint customers the most relevant content and to easily publish new content to the MindTouch knowledge base, as well as identify gaps in product documentation assets–all without ever leaving the SalesForce interface.

Newburyport, MA - Trunity, Inc. has released Trunity Connect, a robust content management system and customer support solution allowing organizations to establish a secure, two-way communication portal with customers and business partners.  Trunity Connect is a gateway to a social environment, increasing operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction, customer retention, business partner understanding and brand loyalty.

Customer Relationship Management is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about it as computer software with a large database populated with customer-related information. Its primary purpose is to organize, track, and automate key aspects of an organization's sales activities.

This leads to higher customer loyalty and retention, more efficient sales and marketing efforts, lower expenses, more effective call center operations, additional opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and while CRM does refer to a program to manage customer information the better CRM software does much more than that.  CRM Software not only allows the organizing of customer information, but CRM software also provides the means to track sales leads from the time they are obtained until the sales are closed.

CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:

I should have put something out about the new version of CivicCRM (1.5) last week, but it got buried with other priorities. My apologies to all the CivicCRM fans out there. I have not loaded CivicCRM myself, but my understanding is that CivicCRM is now based on the Drupal 4.7 code.

For those that do not recognize what CRM stands for, try customer relationship management at Wikipedia. Here is how CivicCRM describes the software in their announcement:

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

New features and enhancements you can expect in CivicCRM 1.5 include:

• A new membership management component
• Search Builder - a new tool for building complex search queries
• Significant memory and speed optimizations