Rich Atkinson

This is the second in a series of posts on choosing a CRM Solution. The first post outlined my wish to find a managed hosted solution to do a lot more than traditional CRM call logging and scheduling.

I think the requirements are best presented in four sections:

• Non-functional,
• Standard CRM,
• User identity management,
• Sales and billing

Non-functional requirements

These requirements don’t describe user functionality, but rather these are system type attributes that I need in a CRM.

• Web-based – of course
• Hosted – Someone else can take care of config and change management, upgrades and security patching. Viva la SAAS!
• Web Sevices or REST integration – To be specified, but essentially I’d like to be able to CRUD anything via HTTP.
• Multi-user: I will hire at least 1 other person to do sales, and one to do support.

Standard CRM requirements

These are traditional CRM features that I expect to see in all products.

• Customer contact tracking, including origin (adwords, standard website, yellow pages, etc), contact history, etc
• Scheduled events: Phone calls, follow-up emails, meetings, etc.

Sales & Billing

These features would allow the CRM to become a key part of the sales process, simplifying third party integration and reducing development time and any manual process. These features might not be available in a CRM product (I don’t know), I may have to look for a separate product with these features, and integrate…

• Ability to accept payments form advertisers via credit cards, or create invoices.
• Scheduled payments for yearly renewals.
• Receipt and account statement generation.

User Identity & Account Management

This is large step away from traditional CRM tools – I would be very surprised to find these features in a hosted CRM solution, but – they would save a lot of work, so they are listed here.

EDIT: IAM are no longer requirements for the CRM, see this post on why use Open ID

• Host sign-up pages where customers can create an account, and select a level of membership (some levels require payment)
• User account self management: password changes and resets, update details, cancel account, submit help request.
• User login – Would we accept users authenticated at and redirected from the CRM site? Or would we query the CRM site with each user credentials? Alternatively, a push of a new/updated user from the CRM site (via HTTP request) to our web site would do, so that we can maintain a copy.

In part 3, we will start to look at some of the CRM products currently available…