What is CRM

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What is CRM
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CRM

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer life-cycle,with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth.

Customer Relationship Management software is an important tool being used by most of the medium and large businesses, companies and corporations applications. It is available as open source and also paid enterprise, professional versions. The paid versions offer extra features and come with technical support service.Open source CRM programs has various advantages like low cost, less implementation time and most of the high level of functionality are available and its offers flexibility to customization based on their business needs. The user has ownership over the software, with access to source code. The disadvantages include lack of tech support which is also compensated with the large community support we have for open source CRM.

Different Types of CRM : Operational CRM, Analytical CRM, Collaborative CRM

Key Features of SuiteCRM	Key Modules of Vtiger	Key Features of Zurmo
Email Integration,Marketing Automation, SalesForce Automation,Customer Support,Social CRM	Lead Management, Account Management, Product Customization, Activity management, Contact Management, Security management, Opportunity management	Contact management, Activity management, Opportunity management, Account management, Lead management, Gamification, Reporting, Workflow, Marketing automation, Product management, Security Management
Benefits	Benefits	Benefits
It helps to focus attention on the most profitable deals. Bring new sales representatives up to speed. Captures leads directly into the CRM system.	Web based is easy to use and can be accessed anywhere. It Delivers post and pre sales activities, offers better user perception, usability and customer support. Integration with email systems, PDF document generation, subscription and so on.	User Friendly functionalities. Customer data can be well organized at a central location. Sales cycle process can be completely automated. Improves the sales progress with better visibility.

Compare Zurmo CRM vs Suite CRM vs Vtiger

Characteristics	Zurmo	vTiger	SuiteCRM
Business Size	Small- Medium business, Large Enterprise	Small-Medium Business	Small- Medium business, Large Enterprise
Platform	Online	Online, On Premise, Mobile	Online, Mobile
Mobile Platforms	✖	Android, iOS	Android, iOS
Languages Supported	English	English	Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish
Analytics, Features	Custom Graphs and Charts, Custom Reports, Dashboards, Pipeline Reports.	Custom Graphs and Charts, Custom Reports, Dashboards, Pipeline Reports, Sales Forecasting, Sales Reports.	Dashboards, Pipeline Reports, Sales Forecasting, Sales Reports.
Customization Features	Customizable Forms and Data Fields, Dashboard Customization, Forecasting Customization	Customizable Forms and Data Fields, Dashboard Customization, Forecasting Customization	Customizable Forms and Data Fields, Dashboard, Customization, Sandbox Environment, User Interface Customization
Sales Automation Features	Contact History, Contact Management, Contact Scheduler, Customer Database, Lead Management	Billing/Invoicing, Contact History, Contact Management, Customer Database, Lead Management, Lead Tracking, Quote Management	Billing/Invoicing, Contact History, Contact Management, Customer Database, Lead Management, Lead Tracking
Market Automation Features	Campaign Dashboard, Campaign Management, Email Marketing, Product Catalog, Social Advertising, Social Media	Campaign Dashboard, Campaign Management, Email Marketing, SMS Marketing, Social Advertising, Social Media	Campaign Management, Email Marketing, Mailing List Management, Multi-Channel Marketing, Product Catalog, Referral Tracking, Social Media
Sales network	✔	✔	✔
Lead / Contact Management	✔	✔	✔
Customer Portal, Estimates, Bills	✖	✔	✔
Email Manager, Integration Outlook, document management	✖	✔	✔
Gamification	✔	✖	✖
Email Campaign	✔	✔	✔
projects	✔	✔	✔
Calendar	✔	✔	✔
Open Source Available	✔	✔	✔

Sugar CRM:

In the open source CRM solutions, Suite CRM is considered as the best standard CRM solution in the industry.
It's having a robust community for support, Suite CRM works with both Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL databases, its written in PHP. It is mostly used for sales automation, support cases, marketing campaigns, calendaring, email and many other functionalities.
The application can be further customized to extend the functionalities specific to the requirements of a business and it can be integrated with social media sites which plays a major role in the customer management solutions.It acts more of a Platform than an application and we have the choice to host the same application on Cloud, on-premise or anywhere.
The best thing is the modern UI, and no. of connectors available to integrate Suite are abundant.

Zurmo:

Zurmo has most of the CRM features like Contact management, reporting, bill tracking, mobile features etc. It also comes with a unique gamification feature which rewards people for using system. So Zurmo projects them-self as a social, mobile and gamified open source CRM.
It is an user friendly CRM where users can create and maintain a customized CRM with the required features.

Vtiger:

Vtiger is a preferred choice for Companies having issues with proprietary software, as vTiger CRM can be used to automate various tasks. The advantage of vtiger being open source is that we can customize the application based on the specific business needs.
It has a cloud version that offers more flexibility.This offers an upper hand over the other CRM software program's limitation over the custom migration issues and it can be moved to the onsite server when needed.

The choice of CRM always depends on the business requirements it needs to serve. All the CRM has its own pros and cons, So we need to compare our requirements and select a CRM which suits the requirements.