Contact Groups

We like Zimplu CRM to be easy to use but we also want it to be flexible, that's why we created Contact Groups and Custom Fields.
Nexus Electronics used to work with other CRM and we had a problem differing the existing Clients from the contacts who were not our Clients. To solve this problem we used to write in the Contact Name "Existing Client" so we could know if the Contact was already our Client. We always wanted to Group our Contacts so we won't have to write other stuff in the Contact Name Field.

Contact Groups will help you assign your Contacts to different Groups and it doesn't have to be Existing Clients or Potential Clients, it can also be Banks, Transport Companies or anything else.

This video will show you how to Create Contact Groups in Zimplu CRM.



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Support Tickets in Zimplu CRM

One of the features that Zimplu CRM offers is Support Tickets.
Support Tickets are used to inform your employees or your co-workers about a problem that appeared for the Company or for one of your Clients.
Lets say that you own a Software Company and a Client has a problem with the product he just bought, he will probably contact the salesman who offered the product in the first place. It's obvious that the salesman won't be able to solve an IT problem so what the sales person will do in this situation is to write a support ticket and assign it to the right person or a group of persons in the company that can solve this kind of problem for the Client.
You can also write a support ticket and assign it to yourself, this will help you remember you have to solve a problem.

Learn How to Create a Support Ticket in Zimplu CRM:

Simplify your Business

Today is a regular day at the office. You sit down, you start drinking your coffee and you thought that today you will finally get to work on some new projects, think the strategy for your products and plan the Company's activity for the rest of the year. You were wrong. You start to get phone calls, you need to solve some problems that you were just been told about and you have some new meetings today that you didn't expect to come. The next thing you know is that outside is dark and your watch says 7 P.M.

Sometimes you have to agree that doing things by yourself makes sense but it should not be a habit. As some people might say, Management is all about delegating activities.

Always make sure to Manage well the Communications in your organization and make sure the information gets to the final destination fast and in good condition, this is vital to the management performance. If you fail to do so, you will end up doing someone else's job all day and you won't even know it.

Finances

If you remember old movies or TV Series like Dallas and the scenes in the office, the first thing that probably comes to your mind is a big pile of paper. Think about how to lose as much paper as you can, keep only what you need and go Paperless.

Consolidate your bank accounts, make your financial records as simple as possible, arrange as many automatic transfers you can, this will also help you stick with the monthly plans.

Financial Crisis

You probably start to feel a headache when you hear these two words. You hear the Financial system is going down, market is going down, nobody can sell as much as they used to sell, politics, terror, everything goes wrong. It's the perfect time to make Money. Think outside the box, the crisis is a big problem for most of us but some companies pray for the crisis to stay as long as possible.

We have a problem ? There are no problems, only opportunities, so be the first one to take advantage of these changes.

Computerization

It all started not so long ago when the computer era began, new ideas came along for making work easier and the best example is software solutions. It was a good thing to start from, most of the companies still use a software for their activities and they will probably use them for a long time but what really breaks through right now is SAAS (Software as a Service).

Companies used to buy and maintain an IT infrastructure which proved to be very expensive. SAAS brings a lot of benefits, the software is now shared on the internet and companies don't need to install anything, you can even use the service wherever you are as long as you have an internet connection.

Custom Fields in Zimplu CRM

When you create a new contact or a new Company in Zimplu CRM, you have some fields that you need to fill before introducing the specific item into your Zimplu Database. Sometimes you need more information about a contact. For example,  if you are a Company that sells GPSs you may need to know how many cars does a potential Customer have and a good Custom Field would be "Cars" or "Number of Cars".
You can also add Custom Fields to Tasks, Support Tickets or Opportunities.

Learn how to create your Custom Fields in Zimplu CRM:

Your Database in Zimplu

We want our customers to be able to work with Zimplu as soon as possible and the database they already have can easily be imported in their Zimplu CRM account.
Imagine you have a spreadsheet with all of your contacts and information. You just created an account but you have a big problem, your database is empty. Thanks to this feature, all of your contacts from the spreadsheet can be in your Zimplu CRM database in just a few seconds.

Learn how to Import Your Database in Zimplu

Users in Zimplu CRM

In Zimplu CRM after you create an account you have the choice to create new Users depending on what kind of subscription you have. The New User can be an Administrator, just like the main User, or it can be a regular User with basic rights.
Why do you need more users ? A new user means one more person that can access your database. You can assign User Names for all of your employees.
As you probably know, in Zimplu CRM you have 3 kinds of  Subscriptions: Lite, Pro and Premium. If you choose Lite, you can have 5 Users maximum, if you subscribe to Pro you will have 20 Users maximum and 50 Users for Premium.

Enjoy the new Tutorial.

How to create Contacts in Zimplu

Zimplu CRM is an easy web application but we thought that this tutorial will be useful for anyone that is using Zimplu CRM for the first time.
In Zimplu CRM you can add a contact, a task, an opportunity or you can add a ticket no matter what you are viewing. We thought our CRM this way, so users can work faster without needing to push too many buttons and load lots of pages to do a simple thing.

Enjoy !

History of CRM

    
CustomerRelationship Management (CRM) is one of those magnificent concepts that swept the business world in the 1990’s with the promise of forever changing the way businesses small and large interacted with their customer bases. In the short term, however, it proved to be an unwieldy process that was better in theory than in practice for a variety of reasons. First among these was that it was simply so difficult and expensive to track and keep the high volume of records needed accurately and constantly update them.

How it started ?

     The 1980’s saw the emergence of database marketing, which was simply a catch phrase to define the practice of setting up customer service groups to speak individually to all of a company’s customers.

     In the 1990’s companies began to improve on Customer Relationship Management by making it more of a two-way street. Instead of simply gathering data for their own use, they began giving back to their customers not only in terms of the obvious goal of improved customer service, but in incentives, gifts and other perks for customer loyalty.

     In the beginning there was PIM, or Personal Information Manager - a limited use, all purpose electronic diary with basic database functionality, that you could use to start organizing your names and addresses, and time, amongst other things. These PIM's are good personal productivity tools, but they tend to fall over when applied in a business environment with a more demanding requirement.

The PIM slowly morphed into the CMS, or Contact Management System, as a result of its increasing take on by people in sales and marketing, incorporating a more specific set of requirements to help them scale the coalface. Contact Managers are fantastic, flexible productivity tools for most anybody or organization. They are also more robust, with improved industrial strength database engines, that are better able to manage larger volumes of data.

Contact Management software became SFA, as in Sales Force Automation systems, what now forms the cornerstone of modern CRM applications. CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management, which is the industry term for the set of methodologies and tools that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way.

Not to mention that some mutated into ERM, sometimes referred to as eCRM(electronic Customer Relationship Management), PRM, with Pro and Lite versions of everything to take products in and out of their respective weight divisions.

Nowadays CRM

    Real Customer Relationship Management as it’s thought of today really began in earnest in the early years of this century. As software companies began releasing newer, more advanced solutions that were customizable across industries, it became feasible to really use the information in a dynamic way.

Instead of feeding information into a static database for future reference, CRM became a way to continuously update understanding of customer needs and behavior. Branching of information, sub-folders, and custom tailored features enabled companies to break down information into smaller subsets so that they could evaluate not only concrete statistics, but information on the motivation and reactions of customers.

     The Internet provided a huge boon to the development of these huge databases by enabling offsite information storage also called SAAS(Software as a Service). A good exemple for nowadays CRM is Zimplu CRM which is able to store companies database in cloud computing. Users are now able to access their information wherever they are.
    SAAS is not a new concept, in our days using a CRM software will slow you down. Creating and launching a CRM software in 2012 it's even worse, it will be a big failure for any company. What is really coming from behind is Mobile CRM, experts expect that Mobile CRM market will boom in 2012, an opportunity of billions of dollars. 

E-Commerce as an Internet Business

Components of an Internet Business

    Every era of business yields new strategies and new ways of doing business. With the advent of radio and television came the first mass-market advertising. Now, the Internet has so radically changed business that the rules for corporate strategy that held for the last 50 years (since the dawn of television) have begun to crumble, says Business Town

   There are some literal elements of commerce that are necessary for any transactions to take place, which are as true for regular bricks-and-mortar commerce as they are for e-commerce. First, whether you are doing business online or in the real world, you have to have a product to sell or a service to offer. Then, you must have a place from which to do business. In the traditional world of commerce this can be a physical store or, in a more figurative sense, a catalog or phone number. In the world of e-commerce the place from which you do business is your Web site.

   In both regular commerce and e-commerce you need to find a way to attract customers to your place of business. This is embodied by your marketing strategy, and everything from advertising to word of mouth fits into this category.

   In order to do business, you also need a way to take orders and process payment. In a retail store there are no orders. Customers simply find the products they want, get in a line at the register, and pay the cashier. In e-commerce, orders have to be placed and items shipped.  Orders are usually handled through interactive, online forms. Money is another issue easily handled in traditional commerce. Customers in a retail store pay by check, cash, or credit or debit cards. Online customers cannot pay by cash or check, only through electronic means. Also, there are issues of security that surround online payment that do not come into play in the traditional bricks-and-mortar world. E-commerce transactions have to take place through secure electronic connections and special merchant accounts for accepting payment.

Once payment is collected, delivery of the product must take place. Fulfillment in traditional stores is as easy as putting the item in a bag and handing it over to the customer. Fulfillment in the world of e-commerce is more difficult, requiring shipping and transportation similar to catalog and mail order businesses. For businesses that integrate e-commerce into their existing business plan, fulfillment is as easy as hiring an extra employee to ship online orders. In Internet startup businesses, fulfillment must often be outsourced to a facility that can handle order processing and shipping in a more timely and professional manner.

What is E-Commerce ?

   Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, ecommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks says the definition at Wikipedia. It also includes the entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction's life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices and telephones as well.

E-commerce can be divided into:

• E-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on Web sites with online catalogs, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall"
• The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data
• E-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospects and established customers (for example, with newsletters)
• Business-to-business buying and selling
• The security of business transactions

The Necessities of E-Commerce

   Businesses that choose to engage in e-commerce have to remember the primary principals of commerce:

• Providing a product or service to be purchased.
• Customers need to know how to find the product or service, so marketing is necessary.
• The exchange of money for the product or service.
• A delivery mechanism.
• Customer service and communication.

These fundamental aspects of commerce are then modified to suit the e-commerce environment.

Successful E-Commerce Operations

   Companies like eMarketer have made it their business to study the trends of e-commerce and generate information on the topic.

Their studies have found the following to be successful e-commerce opportunities:

• Apparel
• Books
• Computer hardware, software and accessories
• Electronics
• Entertainment
• Financial services
• Flowers
• Gifts
• Information
• Music
• Travel services
• Toys

This is not to say that your venture won't experience success by the standard e-commerce definition; it's just that consumers have grown accustomed to purchasing these products and services online.

  To build your business through E-Commerce develop a good understanding of the Internet, how Web sites work and the components that make an effective e-commerce Web site. This doesn't mean you have to design the site yourself, but to have an underlying comprehension of terms is always helpful.

There are a variety of books available to help you learn this, including:

• For the novice: Internet for Dummies by John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young and Carol Baroudi. The Dummy series breaks things down into simple terms and tip references.
• For the advanced: Designing Easy-to-Use Websites by Vanessa Donnelly. A handy guide for those with more technical knowledge.

   Next, ramp up your Business plan to include an effective e-commerce position. Working in the world of e-commerce can upset the apple cart of traditional business models. That is often a positive thing, but if your current business plan doesn't include e-commerce, or your product or service needs to be amended to enter into e-commerce, you'll have to create a new plan.

   Finally, cultivate an awareness of how marketing for an e-commerce enterprise is different from the traditional retail store front or small business arena. A helpful resource for this might be the book Streetwise Lost-Cost Web Site Promotionby Barry Feig.

   An e-commerce definition need not be complicated, but it does ebb and flow with changes in the electronic age. While the foundation is rooted in standard commerce principles, e-commerce will more than likely continue to revise elements that apply only to its practice is what Love to Know Business says.