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I'd love to start a discussion on what sort of companies are using Espo, what the rest of their infrastructure stack is and most importantly how they use as Espo to create value in their teams?
To kick things off we are:
- An equipment / systems supplier in a niche high tech industry
- £8m turnover
- Team of 25 of which ~5 sales, 8 technical, 4 developers + others
- Current CRM (Sugar) which has about 5k accounts and 12k contacts but activity is focused on no more than 50 of these accounts. Its currently just an address book but its database does sit at in the middle of half a dozen other systems that write and read from it.
- 80% of our business comes from our top 10 customers
- Top customers will have 50+ quotes a year and 200+ contacts
- for top customers we will probably exchange 20+ emails a day
- Helpdesk is Kayako and will probably stay that way
- Quotations are done through our own in house developed quotation tools - its awesome so as you will see from other quotes I'm considering various options on how to integrate this.
- Email is shortly to move from inhouse Exchange to Office365 - users access through Outlook and mobile clients. There is no way users will send emails from within Espo.
- Notes are taken in OneNote desktop version and synced to a single OneNote doc on sharepoint; particularly enjoy multiple users being able to synchronously edit the same page in a meeting, the online offline sync as if at a customer site internet access will be intermittent, text sync'd audio recording and screenshot OCR and for the older sales guys some of them using a stylus on a surface book and the handwriting to text recognition.
- Phone system is Asterisk but 90% of calls are via mobile phone or video over Skype for business
- Internal comms is Slack
- Wiki is Deki wiki (needs to be migrated to something better - open to suggestions)
- Files is Office365 sharepoint (we just did the migration and have over 50k files)
- infrequent bulk ish update mailers are sent via sendy. This is great but could consider moving it to Espo
We are looking to relaunch CRM in our company with the following prime objectives:
- We want to encourage more regular meetings with customers outside of our top 10. Plan is to agree within the team the frequency with which we should interact with each customer and then track meetings with them, highlighting those that are overdue a call or meeting. I know we can do this through the reporting tool but I'm still mulling over better ways to achieve it. I think it should really be highlighted nativity within the CRM.
- We want to get away from google sheets for creating silo'd contact planning lists. We have kickoff meetings where we brainstorm who we should invite to a certain event or contact about a certain new technology. The contact is then made mostly face to face or by personal email. see: https://forum.espocrm.com/forum/gene...omer-groupings
I'm particularly interested in:
- How do people use the email integration? We have too much email traffic to have it all archived within Espo, I typically receive ~ 250 a day and on a day I'm in the office I'll send 50 - 100. Unless I'm missing something I don't think an archive of 5k emails against a single contact is going to be viable?
- Is anyone doing any similar contact list management?
- Is anyone else doing any simular volumes of interactions with a single contact / account. Does the user interface cope with this volume of data against a single record?
- How do people record visit reports / meeting minutes / notes? Per above OneNote is awesome but we really need to connect these notes with the CRM...
- I don't really get the stream - if its not searchable what's the point?
Feature requests I think I have so far after a few weeks investigation (but do please tell me if you think I'm missing the point by suggesting any of these features):
- An integration with Office365
-- I'm not sure about email. Obviously the POP integration already works but per above I'm not sure if using this without some strong rules is sensible. Maybe we do this by BCC'ing an address when we want an email archived in the CRM
-- Contact collection and / or synchronisation. Automatically create new contacts. Sync contacts into company wide address book.
-- Calendar sync
-- Recording last contact with a customer feels more appropriate than copying every email into the CRM.
-- An integration with OneNote.
- Ability to search streams
- Ability to create an IFrame element within a view and pass it a variable. Sugar has always done this and its a super simple way of integrating external system data.
- LinkedIn integration? We think contacts ought to have photos?
How about you??
To kick things off we are:
- An equipment / systems supplier in a niche high tech industry
- £8m turnover
- Team of 25 of which ~5 sales, 8 technical, 4 developers + others
- Current CRM (Sugar) which has about 5k accounts and 12k contacts but activity is focused on no more than 50 of these accounts. Its currently just an address book but its database does sit at in the middle of half a dozen other systems that write and read from it.
- 80% of our business comes from our top 10 customers
- Top customers will have 50+ quotes a year and 200+ contacts
- for top customers we will probably exchange 20+ emails a day
- Helpdesk is Kayako and will probably stay that way
- Quotations are done through our own in house developed quotation tools - its awesome so as you will see from other quotes I'm considering various options on how to integrate this.
- Email is shortly to move from inhouse Exchange to Office365 - users access through Outlook and mobile clients. There is no way users will send emails from within Espo.
- Notes are taken in OneNote desktop version and synced to a single OneNote doc on sharepoint; particularly enjoy multiple users being able to synchronously edit the same page in a meeting, the online offline sync as if at a customer site internet access will be intermittent, text sync'd audio recording and screenshot OCR and for the older sales guys some of them using a stylus on a surface book and the handwriting to text recognition.
- Phone system is Asterisk but 90% of calls are via mobile phone or video over Skype for business
- Internal comms is Slack
- Wiki is Deki wiki (needs to be migrated to something better - open to suggestions)
- Files is Office365 sharepoint (we just did the migration and have over 50k files)
- infrequent bulk ish update mailers are sent via sendy. This is great but could consider moving it to Espo
We are looking to relaunch CRM in our company with the following prime objectives:
- We want to encourage more regular meetings with customers outside of our top 10. Plan is to agree within the team the frequency with which we should interact with each customer and then track meetings with them, highlighting those that are overdue a call or meeting. I know we can do this through the reporting tool but I'm still mulling over better ways to achieve it. I think it should really be highlighted nativity within the CRM.
- We want to get away from google sheets for creating silo'd contact planning lists. We have kickoff meetings where we brainstorm who we should invite to a certain event or contact about a certain new technology. The contact is then made mostly face to face or by personal email. see: https://forum.espocrm.com/forum/gene...omer-groupings
I'm particularly interested in:
- How do people use the email integration? We have too much email traffic to have it all archived within Espo, I typically receive ~ 250 a day and on a day I'm in the office I'll send 50 - 100. Unless I'm missing something I don't think an archive of 5k emails against a single contact is going to be viable?
- Is anyone doing any similar contact list management?
- Is anyone else doing any simular volumes of interactions with a single contact / account. Does the user interface cope with this volume of data against a single record?
- How do people record visit reports / meeting minutes / notes? Per above OneNote is awesome but we really need to connect these notes with the CRM...
- I don't really get the stream - if its not searchable what's the point?
Feature requests I think I have so far after a few weeks investigation (but do please tell me if you think I'm missing the point by suggesting any of these features):
- An integration with Office365
-- I'm not sure about email. Obviously the POP integration already works but per above I'm not sure if using this without some strong rules is sensible. Maybe we do this by BCC'ing an address when we want an email archived in the CRM
-- Contact collection and / or synchronisation. Automatically create new contacts. Sync contacts into company wide address book.
-- Calendar sync
-- Recording last contact with a customer feels more appropriate than copying every email into the CRM.
-- An integration with OneNote.
- Ability to search streams
- Ability to create an IFrame element within a view and pass it a variable. Sugar has always done this and its a super simple way of integrating external system data.
- LinkedIn integration? We think contacts ought to have photos?
How about you??