SuiteCRM is the world's best open source CRM software application with a community over 86,000 people, a download count of over 800,000 and an estimated user count of over 4 million users. SuiteCRM offers a flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications and is used by thousands of commercial organisations worldwide.
In regards to law firms specifically, having implemented SuiteCRM, clients tell us that they have benefited in many ways including:
- Go at your own pace: Being able to roll out CRM at their own pace without the pressure of needing to immediately see return on a massive investment in annual license fees.
- Better Key Account Management: getting a full picture of all the interactions with major clients is a prerequisite to any account management process.
- Better focus for BD: your Business Development activities can more easily be focused on the companies and referrers that represent the biggest opportunity.
- Relationship management: improved quality of relationships with referrers (bankers, accountants etc) by having better quality data about them.
- Improved follow-up processes: the conversion of opportunities into cases runs more smoothly and is more effective when managed via CRM
- Improved visibility of sales opportunity: finally you can have a proper sales pipeline.
- Great Return on Investment: with low set-up costs and no 'per user' license fees the projects have excellent ROI.
Why SuiteCRM?
The introduction of Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) has encouraged new entrants and new business models coming to the fore. Can you imagine Cooperative Legal Services not taking a name, phone number and email address from EVERY enquiry and having a systematic follow-up system, even if they do not get instructed on the spot? We can’t. Behind the scenes they will have a very sophisticated CRM system allowing systematic follow-ups. To compete, you need CRM too.
SuiteCRM is helping people to rethink how technology can help companies manage customer relationships. SuiteCRM, the market leading open source CRM application, delivers a feature-rich set of business processes that enhance marketing effectiveness, drives sales performance, improves customer satisfaction and provides executive insight into business performance. This is all supported by deep collaboration and administration capabilities that adapt to how your company operates.
Modules
The primary modules are:
- Businesses - capabilities provide a single view of customers across products, geographies, account, and status. In one single page, users see not only account information, but all associated sales opportunities, contacts, activities, history, cases and quotes. Account management gives your organisation the ability to build tighter, more profitable relationships by understanding the status of each account.
- Contacts - consolidates contacts (prospects, clients, referrers) into a single location and associates contacts & businesses with sales opportunities, account information and customer case information. Proven import and de-duplication technology ensures that your firm has a clean, consistent view of contacts and relationships.
- Opportunities - allows your departments to close deals faster by sharing consistent sales & pipeline information, tracking deal progress, and recording deal-related interactions. Customise SuiteCRM to fit how your opportunity management process works, including sales methodologies, account details, and opportunity handling.
Standard features include:
- Personal Home Pages - allows a custom home page to be created for each user showing the most relevant information to them e.g. Managing Partner sees all opportunities for all fee earners, whereas a fee earner sees a list of their key contacts.
- Security Groups – Full record-level control over security if that’s needed. For example, you could decide that Opportunities can only be edited by the person who created it…or perhaps anyone on the same team (but not everyone).
- Campaign Management - centralises the development, execution and monitoring of marketing campaigns across multiple channels. With SuiteCRM campaign management you can achieve better visibility of the effectiveness of marketing spend e.g. tracking that sales opportunities did result from your Employment Law seminar series.
- Activity Management - can be used to streamline the tasks necessary to get the job done. Manage e-mails, meetings, calendars and calls within a central location to ensure teams work together to close more opportunities in a shorter period of time. Integration with Outlook can be achieved using a simple, inexpensive add-on.
- Email – create email templates that can then be used across the firm, for example, to follow up an inbound enquiry. Ensures consistency of format and information. Can also have files (PDF, Word etc) attached to the email template.
- Project Management - a simple project management application that allows projects and task lists to be managed across a team.