By Tom M Chapman

I recently had a stay in a very nice hotel in the country. It was a small affair and its familiarity was part of the charm. The furnishings and decor were old-fashioned which was pretty nice. However their contact management was similarly antiquated, and this could be the difference between only managing to keep a business afloat and having a business that is booming.

When I asked for some local information, they referred to a sheaf of pages on the counter, which contained names and numbers. Their plumber, greengrocer, contact for the advertisement in the local paper, the

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As well as reporting and resolving problems, the support desk has the means to be a pro-active department that aims not only to solve problems, but to take preventative measures and stop those issues arising in the first place.

Support and Helpdesk tools in OpenCRM offer you the ability to do this and more. With the Helpdesk tied in with the rest of your CRM solution, the support team has a complete picture of customer accounts including order history, previous helpdesk issues, preferences and all other correspondence with the customer.

When a support query arises, the first steps are to

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Many decisions are made on gut instinct and indeed some have become famous for making their fortune by making some “game changing” gut instinct decisions. But for most this approach is likely to be hit or miss, and place the emphasis on “miss”.

Here is where CRM comes into play. Whilst not wanting to remove any of the creative thought process that might be the life and soul of a business, a CRM solution provides a bit of a safety blanket for the instinctive. By offering insight and analysis on previous decisions that were based on instinct, you are able to compare outcomes, and

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Have you ever found yourself with service or software that leaves you needing, less so than wanting, more? More features, more data, more storage? Well, in addition to our no nonsense site wide licencing and fully featured CRM software, we’ve recently upped our data limits at OpenCRM to a massive 2 Terabytes for all customers and all packages, which got me to thinking; exactly how much is 2 Terabytes, and, in terms of value for money, how do we shape up amongst alternative cloud solutions?  While data storage isn’t our primary business, we’re quite happy to stick to what we do best,

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Just like lots of important decisions the best place to start with your CRM solution is at the end!

In other words - "what do I need or want to achieve with the implementation of my cloud CRM solution?"

Gone are the days when you can make a decision on your CRM provider because they gave you a "fuzzy feeling inside" OR "are a market leader and that's all that counts - right?'. There are countless early adopter war stories, probably seeded over a decade ago, that point to a need to quantify where you want to end up - The End Game!

Lots of CRM projects manage to get launched - but do they ever

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