The foundation of a good CRM system is the ability to track prospective and current customers. A business is only as good as its ability to generate new revenue from new customers and keep existing customers happy.
These days businesses are becoming more and more service oriented. As customers have a greater voice it becomes more important that businesses today have the ability to track and interact with them.
All businesses need to manage interactions with customers. Some interactions are simple. A phone call to resolve an issue. An email to let the customer know about an existing promotion. Good CRM systems already have these capabilities in place. A business can interact with customers, track the interactions and assess the impact to the bottom line.
Some customers require a little more than a simple interaction. Depending on the needs of the customer or the nature of the business, a full fledged project may need to be implemented. Any interaction that requires multiple resources, procedures and protocols is a project. Project management is how projects are tracked from beginning to completion.
SuiteCRM gives businesses the ability to implement full project management right within the CRM application. All projects typically involve some combination of resources from sales, marketing, management and support. Since the employees that work within these divisions are going to be using the CRM system anyway, it only makes sense that the CRM system has the ability to create and manage projects.
One of the major benefits to utilizing SuiteCRM for project management is data. In the past, many companies tracked projects outside of the CRM application. This creates a number of issues related to data. Opportunities for redundancy and errors are automatically created when the same data is being tracked in two different places.
Another challenge with using a project management application outside of the CRM system is access control. Employees who may need access to the project might not have the necessary access or get the most up to date status on project tasks. Keeping project management within SuiteCRM allows everyone who needs access to have it. It also allows for the most up to date status since everyone is going to the same place.
How does SuiteCRM provide project management capabilities?
Let’s say you have a business that provides IT services to retail companies. In order to complete a sale, your account managers need to spend 90 days on site with the prospective client to get a full overview of what services are needed. The 90 days on site is really a project and if your company is using SuiteCRM to track the customer and the potential sale, it only makes sense that the project gets tracked within SuiteCRM as well.
Projects don’t necessarily need to be as complex as this. Suppose you are an author and professional speaker. Part of your marketing strategy is to write blog posts on various topics in which you have expertise. A project could be to write a series of blog posts on a specific topic in your area of expertise.
SuiteCRM gives you the ability to create projects right from within the application. One of the benefits to it is you have the ability to either link the projects to specific contacts, specific accounts or not link it at all.
For instance, if you are managing an internal project to update the design of your website, that’s an example of a project that may not be linked to an account or a contact. However, if you are creating a project to generate a white paper for a specific account, that’s a project that you will want to link to the account in question.
Some of the features include project templates, which allows you to simplify the project creation process when you create projects that are similar in scope. Gantt charts allow you to track tasks and activities in the scope of the full project. Team controls allow you to control who sees what so that only certain people can see information that is more sensitive.
Below we have prepared a video that gives you an overview of how the project management module works within SuiteCRM.
Click here to watch the video.
