What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems are the place organisations store contact data, communication history and "status" or "sales progression" for current and potential customers.

All CRMs store personal data by definition and in general the data is stored in a relational database; that part is solved¹.

The key differences from one CRM to the next are:

• User Interface: ease/speed of use
• API: how to programatically insert/retrieve/update data use the customer data in other applications or present it in "dashboards"
• Workflow: defining the internal (business) "process" for processing data.
• Integrations with other business/IT systems
• Communication Channels: e.g: email, Phone, SMS, Twitter, AdWords, Chat Bots, etc.

In our experience, many companies large and small that have a CRM use it ineffectively because of inadequate business process definition, insufficient training given to people using the system and sheer volume of "features" nobody sees the need for.

This is the "Dark side of CRM" no SaaS Vendor will talk about. See: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/07363761311290812

To achieve "success" with CRM there are a few steps that should be taken:

• Define the problem you are solving before beginning the search for a "solution". e.g:
  • Is the problem poor internal communication (within your team) or external communication with existing/potential customers?
  • Is data stored in several places e.g: spreadsheets, email, "dropbox" and a "wiki"?
  • Is communication with prospects structured or ad hoc/haphazard?
  • What are the key metrics in your business/organisation and do your existing business systems streamline tracking/visualising them?
• Document existing business process and identify the inefficiency; quantify the number of inputs, steps to perform a process, interactions with data and outcomes.
  • The more "friction" in the process, the less likely people will follow it. and corresponding "workflow" (if possible)
  • All duplicate manual data entry should eliminated; otherwise the entire system comes crumbling down!
• Clarify who "owns" the data and relationships. Is the customer in control (of their personal data), or does the data "belong" to "the business"?²
  • Who "owns" the relationship? e.g: is it an "account manager"?
  • How easy is it for the prospect/customer to view all the data you have for them, can they edit/update or delete it?
• List your preferred communication "channels" and the reason(s) why they are the best for your business objective(s) or organisational mission. e.g: high value sales are typically done through in-person meetings whereas mass-communication is done through email.

¹ The subject of how data is stored is technically, still a topic of "debate". While most CRMs use RDBMs, a few use "document storage" such as MongoDB in order to store "semi-structured" free-text data. I favour the structured approach combined with "append-only log" as a way of building a CRM because it lends itself to better guarantees and arguably a simpler message-based architecture which will allow for more innovation; more on that later!

² With GDPR the EU has enacted a law to help put the customer in control of their personal data; we think this is excellent! What it means for any company that captures and stores customer is they need to re-think how data is acquired, and is appropriate consent sought? Exactly what data they store and why it's needed, how it's protected while it's in your "care" and what the process is for deleting it when the customer no longer wants to have a "relationship" with you.

Why?

We need to store the data from our web enquiries (people who contact us to work with or for dwyl) in a database and have a clearly defined workflow for managing/progressing the data.

At present we are using an "MVP" solution for this: an HTML form that posts to a Google Spreadsheet. This has worked "OK" for us, and it's even one of our most popular tutorials but we have come up against 3 issues:

1. Data stored in a spreadsheets is not "secure" even if it's restricted to a handful of trusted people, it's still a ton of personal data stored in plaintext without fine-grained access controls or restrictions on exporting.

   Note: we are big proponents of Hyper Transparency in dwyl; we believe that everyone in the team should be able to see our "pipeline". But this is not really "compatible" with data protection (GDPR) because if for any reason someone on our team were to leave their device unattended in a public place (e.g. coffee shop or co-working space) a "bad person" could "steal" our entire customer "database" in seconds with only a few clicks; Google spreadsheets makes it easy to "share" the spreadsheet with a random G-Account or even make the sheet public without approval process. This is a massive risk we should not (and don't need to) take even if the probability is low the impact is super high and we should just avoid it!

2. A spreadsheet "workflow" is not effective/optimised at all, the communication history (email, phone calls, SMS, instant messages) is not stored in the spreadsheet which means that only the one person who engaged in the conversation is aware of the full history thus that person becomes a "bottleneck" in the system or worse the "single point of failure".
   a. Activity of people editing/updating the spreadsheet is not automatically tracked. If someone sees an enquiry come in and follows up (by email or phone) and the forgets to update the relevant row/cell there can be duplicated effort.
   b. Business Process Automation is non-existent; it's all manual. For example scheduling a proposed time for a call/meeting is all manual.
   c. Contacts become "stale" over time as people change jobs, our spreadsheet does not reflect this without manual update. d Date Prioritisation is very manual in the spreadsheet and in general ineffective. We don't capture the urgency of the inquiry/request, so we have "missed out" on interesting opportunities, which is frustrating!
   

3. Spam! last, but not least, spam. In the last month we've had over 50 SPAM requests. (in fact this is a catalyst for us wanting to re-think our enquiry process in recent weeks we've had an increasing volume of Spam submissions through our "contact us" html form which pollute our Google spreadsheet and clog up our inbox! and because the "origin" of the email is our script, Gmail does not know how to intelligently filter the messages as junk!)

   Note: we consider unsolicited messages from "recruiters" wanting to sell us "talent" to be "Spam" and we want to eliminate it.

We need to "fix" this! It's costing us time/money every day and risking personal data loss unnecessarily.

What?

We need to be focussed on "workflow automation" to be more effective at handling our enquiries.

Inbound Enquiries

We receive several types of inbound enquiries, the list of enquiry "sources" in (descending) order of frequency is:

1. Web-to-Lead (via "contact-us" web form)
2. Telephone (via having our mobile phone number public on the website!)
3. Email ("direct-to-inbox") via word of mouth.
4. Twitter
5. Web-based Instant Chat - currently "Gitter", considering other options.

1. Web-to-Lead "Contact-Us" Form

This is where we will be spending the bulk of our time for the next few weeks.

2. Telephone

Our plan is to use a Twilio to handle our both our inbound and outbound voice calls with a telephone number people can call when they need our help.

3. Email

At present we receive email directly to our Gmail inbox. This "works" for now so we don't need to change it. But as soon as we have our "web-to-lead" process nailed, we will be tackling "email-to-lead" from scratch.

4. Twitter

At present we don't have any "process" or "workflow" for Twitter. We need to have alerts for both mentions and specific topics/hashtags. TBD once we have "Web-to-Lead" working.

5. Web-based Instant Messaging ("Chat")

We intend to solve this by building something. But we feel that it needs to "feed" into our "Web-to-Lead" workflow if none of us are online to help the person wanting to chat. So we will return to this once we have the first few elements working.

Outbound Communications ?

We are in the fortunate position that we have not needed to do any "outbound" marketing to get work. All of our clients have come to us through word of mouth or inquiry form.

However, we are planning to begin publishing our "blog" posts and weekly newsletter once we are focussing on our SaaS Product.

We do not consider this to be "marketing", rather it's "sharing updates" with our community.

Who?

For the foreseeable future, our "internal" team of people who already handle the enquiries will be using the "CRM".

How?

Our goal is to find (or build) a CRM that any business can use to safely/securely store the details of the prospective customers.

• [x] Security by default not as "after though".
  • [x] App does not start if API keys are not present.
• [x] Easy to use for quick/focussed interactions.

In addition to having encryption of all sensitive/personal data

Requirements / Roadmap

Mobile UI for On-the-go Access

• Mobile-first for on-the-go at-your-fingertips access and real-time updates.
• Drag-and-drop interface on desktop
• Collaborative
• Access Controls restrict access to data for security & privacy.
• Anonymised data

Access Controls

By default each "instance" should have

• Super Admin
• Admin
• Regular "User"
• Read-only access (for audit and training purposes)

Data Ingress

For "MVP++" we will be using a Web (HTML) form to capture data and store it in a Database.

Data Export

• [] Easy data export (SQL Dump) of complete data to authorised person.

Note" we will require a "GDPR form" to be completed by the data controller and evidence that the person is registered with the relevant data protection authority before we run the export script for their data.

One-Click Start (Zero "Setup")

Use "deploy to Heroku" button? Or "Terraform" to AWS Lambda...?

Keyboard Shortcuts in UI?

While we need to make the CRM as user-friendly and intuitive as possible for first-time and casual users, it's the "power users" who will be interacting with the system most and need the fastest UX day-to-day.

Background Reading & Research

General

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management

Commercial CRM Systems

See: market-research.md

Open Source CRM Systems

We have tried:

• https://suitecrm.com
• https://civicrm.org

Both are PHP-MySQL and both get painfully slow with any volume of data ...