How to Improve a Ready CRM Solution

All small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – as well as huge enterprises – aspire to improve their business processes. And we must understand our customers to optimize and personalize our business processes. To build a customer-centered business, we need to gather and analyze information about our clients. Most businesses use some form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to help them better connect with their customers.

We can identify three key benefits of using Customer Relationship Management software:

You can personalize your business according to your customers’ needs with a CRM strategy.

You can gather and analyze data about your customers’ preferences.

You can determine the best direction in which to develop your company.

When implementing a Customer Relationship Management strategy, you’ll have to choose between building a CRM tool from scratch and using ready third-party CRM software. To know which option is right for your business, consider the following:

First, although enterprise providers – Microsoft, Salesforce, and others – supply flexible CRM tools, you’ll still need to set up their software to meet your company’s particular needs. Implementing ready CRM software can still be a challenging task.

Second, consider the size of your company. There’s no need to purchase a subscription for a super-advanced CRM solution if your company won’t use it to the fullest. CRM tools such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce are bloated with functionality your business might not need. For a small or medium-sized business, it’s often best to install and improve on a simple piece of CRM software. One such solution is Fat Free CRM.

This article will help you understand why it’s a good choice to use Fat Free CRM for your small to medium-sized business. We’ll also explain what features can be added to a Fat Free CRM application.

What’s Fat Free CRM?

Fat Free CRM is a Customer Relationship Management application built with the Ruby on Rails framework. Fat Free CRM software is designed to help small to medium-sized businesses manage contacts, leads, and marketing campaigns. Fat Free CRM provides a simple, efficient interface with a minimal set of features that every SMB needs.

Fat Free CRM has eight tabs that let users view, enter, and save data:

Dashboard (aggregates information from other tabs);

Tasks (helps manage your workflow);

Campaigns (helps create and manage data related to marketing campaigns);

Leads (allows sales managers to manage data about leads);

Accounts (manages current accounts of customers);

Contacts (manages contacts);

Opportunities (a tab for sales managers to manage deals that can be closed);

Team (a tab with statistics about all marketing and sales representatives).

Each tab provides enough functionality to handle data related to leads and marketing campaigns. You can try a demo of Fat Free CRM to get a feel for this Ruby on Rails application. To use this demo version, just enter ‘aaron’ as both the username and password.

What Are the Benefits of Fat Free CRM?

Custom software answers best to specific business needs. But building your own CRM application is costly and takes time. Ready-made CRM software, such as Fat Free CRM, provides you with minimal functionality that’s usually enough for an SMB. Below, we’ve listed several reasons why SMBs should consider Fat Free CRM.

Far Free CRM Is Free

Fat Free CRM is an open-source solution and is completely free. Other ready-made CRM solutions, provided on a Software as a Service model – such as Oracle’s CRM On Demand – require a subscription fee per user per month. In other words, if more sales representatives and marketers start using the software, you’ll pay more to your CRM provider.

Fat Free CRM, on the contrary, allows many users to employ their software without charging for anything.

Originally published here https://rubygarage.org/blog/how-to-improve-a-ready-crm-solution

Sviatoslav Andrushko is a content manager at RubyGarage. Sviat adores writing about web development, web design, testing, and other IT-related topics.