Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Case Management and Solutions support in iFreeTools CRM

iFreeTools CRM (Alpha) has now added support for Case Management and Solutions database.

Customers (existing and potential) often raise queries or provide feedback on the organization's products/services and it is in the best interest of the organization to provide prompt replies to such queries and resolve the issues faced. In the process, it is important to track all the interactions as part of the conversation with that customer, so as to enable better relationship with the customer. The Case Management module helps one achieve this.

While solving the problems, it is also useful to catalog the problem along with the solution of resolved case, as part of a solutions database. Such a database can be opened up for all customers, serving as a knowledge base.

Check out the new features at iFreeTools CRM.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Are your marketing people bad-mouthing competition (behind your back) ?!

Chanced upon a referrer link from collecta.com to my personal blog. Checked out to see the context of how my blog got referenced. Collecta provides search for real time content. So I assumed that my blog should have got into the results because of the "CRM" keyword in my post on iFreeTools CRM.

So did a search for "CRM", to check out the results in collecta. Right on top of the results was a tweet on Zoho CRM, rather in a negative way, which I knew was far from truth (if I cannot say "an outright lie"). For those unaware, Zoho (previously AdventNet) was my employer for 100 months right from when I was fresh out of college until I quit to start out on my own, about a year back.

Went to check out the twitter account of the user and found that it was used as a marketing tool (probably with a minimal cost-per-click and additional cost-per-action payments) to drive traffic to a competitor - FreeCRM. Nothing wrong in promoting ones products/services, but why provide wrong information about a competitor or make unsubstantiated claims..

Wrong info...
Zoho CRM goes down all the time this is better http://bit.ly/18lfAx
Zoho CRM has hidden costs and terrible support http://bit.ly/18lfAx

Unsubstantiated/Dubious claims..
Ranked #1 against Zoho CRM and Sugar CRM http://bit.ly/18lfAx

zohobiz is the handle for the Zoho focussed tweets, while bbakari tweets with more diversifications - targeting Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Sugar CRM and vTiger. Both twitter accounts use the same bitly link. The bitly link statistics available at http://bit.ly/info/18lfAx shows more than 16,557 clicks in less than 2 months.

Not sure if FreeCRM is aware of the methodology used, but they should be; And moreover they should not fund such marketing activities.

Puzzled at how both Zoho and FreeCRM allow such twitter accounts to exist and continue posting such tweets for around 2 months now !!

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(After yesterday's alpha release, Vendor module is now available as part of iFreeTools CRM - Alpha. Check it out and let me know your feedback).

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

iFreeTools CRM - Alpha Version

Sahasvat is happy to make available an alpha version of its CRM/SFA (Sales Force Automation) hosted solution - iFreeTools CRM

CRM/SFA will be first of the many business applications that will be made available by iFreeTools. The applications will be ad-supported and have restrictions on the storage used and on the number of mails sent.

The modules made available for this initial version are..
  • Leads
  • Accounts
  • Contacts
  • Opportunities
  • Campaigns
  • Products
  • Users

Other deployment options
If you would like to have one of the applications deployed to run on your domain, we can help you achieve the same with our professional services. Such a deployment will offer you
  • 1 GB of storage (and above)
  • 2000 emails/day (and above)
  • Rebranding
  • No advertisements
  • Additional customizations (optional)
Rates for application deployment start as low as $99/year for upto 25 users going to a maximum of $299/year for unlimited users. Customization charges are one-time only and would depend upon your requirements.

The application will be hosted in Google AppEngine and you need not have to pay more, if you stay within Google AppEngine's Free Quota. Additional usage can be purchased directly from Google at $0.15/GB/month and $0.0001/email.

iFreeTools.com is built over Google App Engine; but is not affiliated to Google.

In case you have any further queries, do get in touch with raj@sahasvat.com.