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Companies big and small over the years have invested in CRM solutions  in the hope of extending the breadth and depth of their customer relationships , the purported benefits of CRM are well documented some of them you can see here

Over the years as organizations struggled to make sense of the investments they made in CRM, they have been stung by another disruption the  S (Social) word, the customer which CRM as a tool would have helped them manage has gone social , and know organizations have to figure out ways , how to manage a Social Customer, Jeremiah Owyang has shown the various use cases , which summarize the SCRM challenges here.

One of the critical challenges organization face is how to create actionable  and responsive social strategy in light of so much information being thrown around on various social channels like twitter, facebook , while various social media analytic vendors like Radian6 , lithium have created social dashboards which help organizations to track their social pulse , there are not many quality tools which integrate with CRM, and produce actionable social intelligence( if i may use this word ).

The challenges are more acute for Small and medium organizations using open source CRM solutions like Sugar CRM, VTiger etc to manage their social customer relationships.

I think there is a big opportunity for some nifty startup to solve this growing problem of creating an actionable Social Module for CRM.

Recently, a comment on one of our posts (The cost aspects of CRM for SMBs) led us to analyze a web based SaaS application WORKetc. WORKetc as the name suggests is an enterprise application which helps you manage your work flows and plus,It  follows the rule of 80-20 and takes the most used features of CRM, Project Management and Invoicing and clubs them into an easy to use application.  Lets have a look at the offerings of the service with regards to a few keypoints.

Why WORKetc : The pain points that WORKetc targets to address are :

• A lot of different softwares for different functions lead to high maintainence and training costs. WORKetc lets small businesses consolidate down to the single software.
• Customer have started with either too simple or too high level software. This has led to increased complexities and increased costs in the system.

Who will use WORKetc: WORKetc positions itself as an application that helps consolidating your work flow right from generating a sales lead to the end of project thus offering several advantages including:

• Reduction of training costs as employees get trained only in one software.
• Providing consistent look and feel to the whole workflow.
• Reduction of IT budget as you dont invest in multiple applications.

The above said positioning makes the application very lucrative for the Freelancers and small/medium businesses which can’t afford costs of multiple software apps and have resource crunch in the form of time and money to train the resources. Most of the human resources for such businesses are usually remote resources and its really impractical for them to train so many remote contractors.

What is Inside (Feature Set): WORKetc is a relatively complex application since it consolidates many single purpose applications into one but folks at WORKetc have done a great a job in figuring out the most valuable features for each use case while still maintaining the intuitive UI and a great UX. The feature set includes but not limited to:

• Web Based CRM
• Project Management Software
• Invoice & Billing Software
• Shared Software
• Helpdesk managment
• Document management
• Email Campaign Management

A more comprehensive list of features can be found out at WORKetc’s site.

How Much it costs : WORKetc comes at an affordable and genuine price tag. The plans start from as small as 29$ per month for a single user license and you can buy licenses on per user basis. You can have as many clients as like without paying for them. Only employees of your company need to have a license. A 15 days trial is available without even the need of a Credit Card. You can signup for the trial here.

What more can be done: A Few welcome additions to the application would be:

• The CRM module is quite complete but addition of marketing campaigns would be a great additional feature.

Conclusion: Although a great application, but WORKetc is currently oriented to Freelancers/companies who run most of their business online.  It would help you considerably reduce your Saas applications budget and training cost. But if you are a CRM user who works mostly offline like Export/Insurance sector SMBs, then WORKetc might not be the right solution for you.

Recently I held several discussions with a few of my friends running small companies(sub 1 million dollars). The meeting was  purposed specifically on the point of why they are not using the CRM to manage their sales team(I dont say sales force here because a sub one million dollar company can afford only a small team) and the most common myth amongst them was that CRM is an expensive software both in terms of resources(cash and people) and time.

Before going deep into this topic,  Lets analyze the expectations of a normal SMB from their sales team. Similar to other organizations, SMBs want their sales team to :

1. Manage different types of conversations that can happen between a company and a consumer and learn about their needs .
2. The team is then supposed to analyze their needs and make proper promotions to the user at strategic times in the future.

CRMs are built to handle the above two requirements. Other wide spread use of CRM is to manage support tickets and calls from the users.

Given the advantages that a CRM brings to the table, its worth a shot to analyze the costs associated with deploying a CRM for a small organization. Let me be crystal clear before we move ahead, the cost associated is not an absolute zero and if you are looking for an absolute zero kinda idea on CRM deployment, then this post might not be worth a read for you further. But one thing that i can assure is that the small cost associated with CRM deployment is really worth a shot given the boost that it can give to your sales graph. To estimate the effectiveness of the application of CRM to your business, you must take an informed decision and evaluate atleast the following factors before going all guns.

CRM Installation and infrastructure Costs: A good CRM incurs some cost to be installed at the consumer site. But here comes open source to the rescue. There are a lot of good open source CRMs(SugarCRM, vTiger etc) available these days that come with easy to use installers and the only cost that you would need to incur is the cost of hosting(shared hosting is available ranging from 3$per month to maximum of 10$ per month depending upon the choice of your host). Data storage is also so cheap these days(You can look at the amazon plans to know more about them)

Customization Costs: Its quite a possibility that the default CRM installation does not match your business requirements exactly. You might need additional functionality to get your business representation effectively on a CRM. It used to cost a lot of money during late nineties and early twenties but today a lot of CRMs come with easy to use configuration tools which have made customizations a real cake walk even for a non technical user.  Most of the customizations can be handled using the embedded configuration tools. In case you need to get some module or functionality built which can’t be handled by these configuration settings, then you can easily hire a good cheap developer to do the customizations for you(Crowd sourcing based freelance portals like odesk, elance, Rentacoder, getafreelancer etc are the key here).

CRM Training Costs: A lot of people would argue that the training costs of a CRM is too high. With open source coming into play,  a lot of users now contribute their knowledge to the  community and hence lot of knowledge base is available regarding the effective CRM usage (obviously for good CRMs like SugarCRM). With the advent of social networks and portals every good CRM software have got an end point like facebook pages, twitter account where you can reach the maintainers of the software and they will help you in the right direction for training your employees in their software.  Though there would be a bit of training cost involved initially but it wont scale linearly like the older days rather it would keep on decreasing as you build your business on top of it.

CRM Maintainence Cost: Technically it would be nothing more than the hosting cost that you would require to host the CRM plus the database and the file system costs(which have gone to dirt cheap levels with amazon’s cloud hosting leading from the front and will go cheaper in future).

With all that said, Its worth a shot to compare the cost of using a CRM with the boosts in the sales that the CRM brings to your specific business before taking the final decision of going ahead with CRM deployment(I will take up how a company can use a CRM in a seperate post). After all its all about increasing the profitability.

For years we all have witnessed the evolution of social networks for personal interactions to transform into business interactions. Traditional business marketing strategies are in a phase of accepting these new changes yet falling behind by eons when it comes to accepting social media as a game changer. My personal belief is that Future businesses will grow through medium of community sharing via Technical innovation combined with information flow among the social ecosystem. For those with a foresight, they know that social revolution is here to stay and it requires changes in business approach and its support techniques such as CRM.

So where to begin from. A great probability is your company is already in social space doing some tits and bits here and there and a CRM Strategy. But what most of such forays fail to survive a great length of time, and looses the sheen, since they fail to bring these two wheels roll in tandem as one service.

The Social CRM should be treated as a part of whole CRM Strategy. Many of the times, while concentrating on the social facet, the CRM is kept in the back drop as a standard tool. Following should help you to lay ground rules to move in this direction.

1. SWOT: First step should be analyzing your current or potential CRM service. We all know, not each and every CRM serves all the purposes and they are always a part of the organization whole strategy to manage customers. So acknowledge the strength of the CRM wrt to Social media.

2. Flexibility: Count in the factors such as flexibility to accomodate ever changing demands, business processes, long term need of the customer adaption.

3. Robustness: Social media differs from Traditional customer interaction. Where as traditional media are one way driven, social is 360 degree interaction b/w customer and the organization. The CRM should be robust enough to support these interactions real time else, it will be a discontinued customer experience if CRM can not leverage this.

4. Integration: Users can search on linkedin, leave feedback on facebook, point on twitter and the CRM  focussing the data and source, can allow to respond back seamlessly from the CRM without having to go to individual source which might be tedious and unproductive at large volumes.

5. Ease of Use: Multiple Account handling is a topping on the cake when it comes to manage customers across the networks via many to many interactions.

If your CRM miss on any of these, you need to address these issues before taking a step forward in going with Social CRM.

In our coming articles, We will continue to focus on the holistic approach of picturing out the comprehensive social CRM solution to harness the vast potential of socialCRM for your organization.