Getting your head around Customer Relations Management systems is difficult. You need to ascertain if they suit your specific business and your needs. Here is a brief overview of some of the main CRMs as a launch pad for your own research.
Zoho Office Suite: A web-based online office suite containing word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, web conferencing, customer relationship management, project management, invoicing and other applications developed by Zoho Corporation, a California-based company.
Graham Hill, business advisor and CEO of Metisc software vendor, says that businesses are starting to move away from Zoho when they reach the five-user free limit. After five users you pay a licence fee. He says Zoho is a graphical web-based platform and has many software integration options.
SugarCRM: Produces the web application Sugar, a customer relationship management (CRM) system. SugarCRM’s functionality includes sales-force automation, marketing campaigns, customer support, collaboration, mobile CRM, social CRM and reporting. SugarCRM is the community edition of the API SugarCRM open-source system. It has been in the market place for a long time. Hill says a problem with open-source software is that there is no support available. Sugar has an enterprise edition that has support, but it can be expensive.
Oracle Database: This is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is commonly used for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP and DW) database workloads. Also called Oracle RDBMS or just Oracle. The newest suite is called Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud, which aims to provide total automation.
NetSuite Inc: Software services to help manage business finances, operations and customer relations. This is an American cloud computing company founded in 1998 with headquarters in San Mateo, California.
HubSpot: A developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing and sales. Its products and services aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimisation. It was founded in 2006. HubSpot is popular in the marketplace. Graham says people like its good marketing tools. It has an excellent ranking system for leads and prospects based upon website analytics.
Quick Base: A low-code platform, that is a web-based database service for easy access, consolidation, and sharing of business information. In 2005, QuickBase was chosen as PC Magazine Editors’ Choice and won the SIIA Codie Award for Best Business SoftwareProduct or Service. It was originally called oneBase and is a division of Intuit.
Oracle NetSuite: This is a suite of products. It is popular in the market place, although it would probably not suit a small business. It is quite expensive to implement and does not really offer a comparable advantage to Microsoft 365, Sugar or Salesforce.
