Customer Relations Management

Hello,

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Matthew Patton wrote:

>Other applications we are looking to either develop or incorporate are a
>Contact Management system

I'll add a little info about this one.  In particular we would like to
find an OSS equivalent of the Windows CRM (Customer Relations Management)
application Goldmine by FrontRange Solutions
(http://www.frontrange.com/goldmine/).

For those who don't know (I didn't until recently), CRM software is much
more than just a PIM (personal information manager).  It's usually
designed for salespeople who want to schedule and track what happens
during all of their interactions (email, phone, face to face) with
customers and potential customers.  We've found that type of software to
also fit very well for fund raising, as it is very people oriented and not
unlike sales in some ways.

A number of our staff use Goldmine and like it, except that it's somewhat
buggy, proprietary and Windows-only, and relatively expensive.  It's
starting to get more expensive as we need to buy fancier software from
FrontRange called GoldSync to allow the sharing of contact information
between our staff (so they know what each staff person has done with a
particular contact).

We're planning on implementing most of the software Matt mentioned as web
apps, but this Contact Management software is one thing that I think might
be particularly useful to have as native app with a local copy of the data
in addition to a web app front end.  That way when you're on the road and
cut off from the Internet you can still read and modify contact info.  My
thought is that the native app could be written in something like wxPython
for easy cross-platform development.

So there are some more detailed thoughts of mine...

Jason