Customer Relationship Management mode for board

[reos-rcrozier]

The Deck app is excellent, and in fact it has so many features that it is extremely close to being useful as a fairly advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program for businesses. This would have huge enterprise value. I am proposing that boards in the Deck app could have a CRM mode which adds certain features.

How would Deck be used as a CRM?

Each list would represent a sales stage, and each card will become a sales opportunity. As opportunities progress, they get moved along the sales pipeline, just like in Kanban.

See Odoo for another open source example of a CRM, you will find tutorial videos for such a CRM like this that show the functionality.

What features are missing to be a CRM?

At a minimum, each sales stage should have a defined probability of success, and each opportunity a potential value. Then one can add logic to produce a value of the sales pipeline by multiplying all the opportunity values by the probabilities for each stage and summing them up for all stages.

Later other functionality could be added, e.g.

• notes associated with stages to give instructions for what each stage represents and when you can move to the next stage
• clients database (where clients can be companies, organisations or individuals) attached to sales opportunities (cards), and clients linked to contacts from the contacts app
• importing emails from the mail app to opportunities notes
• reminders to follow up client interactions

Describe alternatives you've considered Forking the Deck app to create a new CRM app, but it seems too daunting.

[putt1ck]

Sounds like something that could be built with the API rather than added into core

[reos-rcrozier]

Sounds like something that could be built with the API rather than added into core

Would that mean making a second app to present this information?

[putt1ck]

You'd be able to see/edit the information in Deck; but you'd normally add and be able to view information from the dedicated UI and/or other apps (NC or otherwise e.g. a bolt-on for your email). Much simpler for everyone than trying to extend Deck itself

[reos-rcrozier]

Sorry, I don't follow how one would add, for example, a piece of information like an opportunity value to a card in Deck through the API, as there is no such data entity available for a card? I also don't follow how one would view this information in Deck?

[putt1ck]

Per board tags would seem a candidate for opp value

[reos-rcrozier]

Per board tags would seem a candidate for opp value

But each card is an opportunity, and would need it's own value, and each board (representing a stage) would need it's own %, and wouldn't this massively pollute the tag namespace? i.e. won't I see every opportunity value ever chosen as a potential tag? I guess I may not have been that clear, below is a mock-up of the ideal scenario:

[putt1ck]

Tags per board