Integrated CRM pilot
What (summary)
This task is to install SugarCRM, program feeds from AboutUs.org, develop workflows our current workload, and, commit to SugarCRM as our corporate CRM solution.
Why this is important
A configurable CRM system enables Content, Community and Operations groups to adapt, scale and innovate in business processes without being dependent on programming changes from our development group who is more appropriately focused on our customer facing technology.
We expect the CRM system to hold private information related to AboutUs as a business, not public information AboutUs as a community. When we capture private, customer information on our public site, this information will be fed to the CRM system and the corresponding business processes.
DoneDone
This project will be done when we can effectively use SugarCRM for at least two pilot business processes. This includes:
- Have SugarCRM installed, available and backed up on Nimbus using the same permissions as our admin wiki.
- Have have historical data copied and online feeds connected for the pilot processes.
- Show that customer data is not lost should there be an outage of the CRM system.
- Configure SugarCRM such that employees can be trained, will understand and will prefer to use the CRM over our existing solutions.
Steps to get to DoneDone
These steps are out of date and should be replaced with a more realistic plan. See following sections for more info about work to be done.
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Install SugarCRM on Nimbus, with db tables in mysql as in independent database-- Ethan-
Setup login and access rights to match those of our admin wiki -
Run the web configuration program to set up the database and permissionsJohn
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Configure SugarCRM for our purposesJohn -
Copy and then feed GrowYourBusiness orders using rails scripts and online updates.-- Stephen- Create new prospects and customers as appropriate
- Create and track work on orders, including reminders and completion.
- Copy and then feed AdvertiseHere orders using rails scripts and online updates. -- tbd
- Detect same customer for both processes, consolidate customers when they turn out to be the same
Download/Upload
We integrate by downloading CSV data from the live server and then uploading that to SugarCRM. The current process is:
- download from specific url, next desired event specified as part of url
- clean data using spreadsheet program
- upload data to SugarCRM
- complete any SugarCRM data that can't be uploaded through CSV
We would like to make this process automatic. It is not clear how the human intervention of the clean and complete steps can be automated.
We are adding cleaning helpers to the download process. These helpers are of two forms:
- automatic substitutions
- caution highlighting
Automatic substitutions are written as accessing methods on the active record model. They make the data in the model appear to be different than it is without changing the actual data in memory or in the database. The leads-csv action downloads the data with substitutions while the older csv action does not.
Caution highlighting is coded as part of the leads view. It is meant as an aid to online editing before downloading. Caution highlighting does not change the data but online editing would.
Each lead offers three lead specific actions:
- Show -- shows all data for one specific lead event, without substitution
- Edit -- offers to modify one specific lead event. The edit is destructive and is currently very error prone due to the use of JSON format.
- Destroy -- this will destroy the specific lead and cannot be undone.
Country
Country is currently an optional entry field. This means that we will accept a lead with no country entered. We do not check that the country matches any particular list of country names at time of entry. A lead could, and sometimes do, enter a city, state or even domain name, for the country.
We accept a variety of spellings of US, UK and Canada. These are converted on download.
The countries built into the crm disagree with the iso countries found here:
- http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/english_country_names_and_code_elements.htm
