Sunday, 20 February 2011

Evolution of CRM Tools to SCRM

We had been talking quite a bit about Social CRM from years but me thinks that the traditional CRM tools are not completely geared up to embrace the concept of SCRM and provide necessary services to small/large scale businesses.

Although i dont quote myself to be a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) expert, i definitely see a need for a right mix of CRM and SCRM (Social CRM) co-existing within the available tools. To make my statement more clear i would like to first touch on the trend change that we had and are witnessing in terms of customer relationships and support. There is an element of confusion between Social CRM and Social Media Monitoring which me thinks will disappear to an extent if CRM tools can address the subtle changes that we are seeing in following areas.


Social Space:
Trends have increasingly changed at customer relationship front in way they are engaged. Community appears to be the way forward than each customer management. With the success of social netoworking there is an expectation that the product support will be simplified via the social networking sites than traditional call centers and support forums. Following diagram gives a quick view of the change that is being witnessed at customer relationship end.














Customer Space:
The purchasing process from a customer point of view has also changed quite a bit with gradual shift from shops>>websites>>devices(apps)>>what next? It is hard to imagine that anyone would design a CRM tool that has features to enhance relationships on websites and not mobiles or tablets these days. Lets see what changes are we seeing from customer experience point of view laying down some trends for how CRM tools should be shaped up for future.













Sales Space:
Sales and Marketing of any product should change from traditional ways and consider changes highighted so far. That by no means is a small change. Sales mindset has to completely accept that its not just $$'s but its relationships in true sense that now matters, getting customer loyal that matters, the positive vibe on product within the community that matters over planned profits. To highlight a few changes that are clearly visible in current day:












Before going further i guess i should make it clear that by no means i intend to say transactions, lead generation and product marketing are no longer the heartbeat for a product but what i intend to say is all of them are going to get better should we approach it via social marketing. Current sales strategies ofcourse will work but may not see the desired results with the changing customer mindset.

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Thursday, 17 February 2011

Top 10 tools for mobile website testing

Thinking about the the various mobile devices and various websites, tried to come up with an article which is a marriage of the two. How best can we test websites on different mobile apps. What we tried to come up with is list of top ten mobile testing apps for websites. You could read the full article at Top 10 tools for mobile website testing.

Please do post your comments on your experiences on above tools if you used them or feel free to let me know on any good missing tools from the list.

For other interesting articles visit other articles at ToolsJournal Articles
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Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Thetechyblog!: Nokia adopting WP7 as its Primary Ecosystem!

Thetechyblog!: Nokia adopting WP7 as its Primary Ecosystem!: "Yes, you heard it right. Today is, in my opinion a sad day for every symbian user who is currently using symbian or is a symbian fan., Nokia..."

Sunday, 13 February 2011

Best of Enterprise Search Tools

This week has been all about search and boy what a market, there are more than 500+ search tools in the market and i guess 500 is a bit less to quote. Realizing i will not be able to explore all the tools had to be cheeky and cut it down to "Enterprise Search" :).

All i knew so far were some known tools like FAST, Omnifind and others but i did realize that there are robust search engines out there in the market that are as good. Have tried to put a concise view of all such search engines into an article on ToolsJournal.

Please feel free to visit the article and leave your comments at http://toolsjournal.com/tools-world/item/145-10-of-the-best-enterprise-search-tools

10 Enterprise Search Engines (A Quick View Though)

Please do post your comments on your experiences on above tools if you used them or feel free to let me know on any good missing tools from the list.

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Saturday, 29 January 2011

Best of KANBAN Tools

Had been busy exploring good tools available on "Kanban" and yes i ve got a list of around 14 of them. Although most of you are aware what Kanban means lets just revise in two lines......

Kanban, also spelled kamban and literally meaning "signboard" or "billboard", is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. According to Taiichi Ohno, the man credited with developing Just-in-time, kanban is one means through which JIT is achieved. Kanban is not an inventory control system. Rather, it is a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

You can refer to a quick and very interesting listing at http://www.toolsjournal.com/tools-world/item/142-kanban-tools howevere here comes a quick listing of all Kanban tools available today. There are few more coming up and in beta version and hope to get chance to review them in few days.

Top 14 Kanban Tools:
Please do post your comments on your experiences on above tools if you used them or feel free to let me know on any good missing tools from the list.

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Sunday, 16 January 2011

7 Free Open Source CRM Tools

Talk about CRM tools and people talk much about Free CRM, SaleForce, ZOHO and other well known tools. Undoubtedly they may be or probably are superior tools, however in essence all these tools are ofcourse free but limited by either number of users/licenses or restricted functionality.

However i was trying to see if i can have a CRM for my own use which exposes all the functionality, provides me extensibility which is open source and also comes with good community support. Surprised to see there are not many out there. I could however list 7 of them which were more relevant to what i am looking for and am sure will meet most of the small to medium businesses needs operating on low budgets.
  • CiviCRM
  • openCRX
  • opentaps
  • hipergate
  • vtiger
  • PMAM CRM
  • Fat Free CRM
For more details on above tools/features/downloads/URLs please refer to

Will be soon (next 2 weeks) listing all CRM tools available in the market as part of our efforts to share knoweldge on software tools through ToolsJournal.

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Saturday, 15 January 2011

What Agile Tool and How to Choose

Many a times i come across organizations selecting an agile tool with no buy in from people who are going to use it. Sounds familiar isnt it? While doing some research on agile tools available in the market almost close to 80 of them, trust me when i say everyone whom i interviewed informally on the agile tools known to them or came across so far working in IT, at the max people knew only 3 to 4 tools available in the market.

I would like to, through this blog post send a message that its not just one or two known tools but the tool supplier community have created incredible and over 80 tools which are having their own specialities. Please feel free to browse through all the agile tools available at http://toolsjournal.com/agile-management-tools

I realized it is indeed a wonderful idea to not only list the tools but also do what we can at toolsjournal.com to address the problem of what to consider while selecting an agile tool. The result is a simple write up on my experience choosing a tool for my own use. Please feel free to read this at

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