I'm trying to find a database for customer relationship management. For example, we have cutomers calling our office, and someone writes it down. Someone else might call them back, but the paper doesn't get thrown out (our current "method" of "resolving" issues), so someone else calls them back a second time. Other times, the paper gets lost, the customer is upset they didn't get called back, and ... well ... you get the idea.

So any recommendations that y'all have?

Goldmine is a good one, or use access, Or you can simply make a procedure in the office where ALL calls get followed up on. This is very important in customer service to follow thru on your promises.

Will Goldmine handle customer backorder notifications i.e. keeping track of backorders with reminders to notify the customer of status? This has always been my biggest headache.

Yes Goldmine is used by lots of major companies, just make sure you get a version you can use on your machines, you can get it on ebay at a good price.

You could also use your outlook to remind you daily of backorders. Just add the order to the list or on the date it is due back in. To check on it thats what we do.

I am a new user of www.salesforce.com and just recently attended a users group event. Their new Application Exchange may have what you are looking for. Worth taking a look at.

I'm using act 2006 www.act.com


It was a bit more user friendly than goldmine. Goldmine looks like it has a ton of features that would scale well for a mid to large company. I felt act was good enough for small to mid size companies.

Both goldmine and act have free trial versions.

We started using LegrandCRM about 5 months ago, and it has been awesome. It integrates with Quickbooks and Outlook (contact info, accounting info), allows you to track opportunities, mail merge with Word, assign tasks, etc... You can also customize a lot of the tabs/fields, which was important to us.

There are also file import features that allow you to create customized maps. We use this to export CSVcustomer lists from MC and import them into the application.

Money-wise, you can't beat it, and support answers my questions in less than an hour.

http://www.legrandcrm.com

There are videos on the site that show you how it works.

Good luck!

Out of curiosity, just how many orders are you handling that you need software to keep track versus just monitoring the "store orders" categories in the admin panel? With my operation I just move the orders from "new orders" to "ready to ship" and then "complete" within about a day. If you keep your inventory in order you shouldn't have many backorders to worry about. The problem children get moved into distinct order status buckets that can be easily and regularly reviewed. Of course I don't generally have more than a couple hundred a day to deal with.

We have started working with Salesforce.com. This is a very robust CRM with amazing features and a strong API for integration. We use StonoEdge Order Manager with our stores for direct input of orders and wrote an API to input our customers from StoneEdge to Salesforce.com. This allows us to add all customers instantly into sales force and not have to worry about errors in entry and lowers costs.

Check out www.salesforce.com