User Experience & Interaction Design

Okay here is today's update. The actions is now updated with a drop down box.



To download the actions : UI-Elements.atn

Till now, I have been looking into the CRM from an End-user POV. But when I was going through the Page Customization requirement today, it became obvious that I have to concentrate on Consultant View too. Little late learning, but it is essential.

A CRM deployment is used by the consultant first. The Architect/Consultant captures the organization's work flow and implements into the CRM work flow. The time taken to deploy a CRM system is a key factor in estimating the costs. The quicker is better, because it saves money and time to the organization.



So as of my learning till date, a CRM system is used by two types of users.

1. Architects/Consultants - During deployment
   
2. End-Users - After the deployment
   

Behemoths like SAP or SIEBEL are often deployed in large enterprises, which requires a team of experts to customize the CRM to capture the organization's workflow. For Small and Medium businesses, usually the Sales manager becomes the architect/consultant and defines/captures the work flow.

Online CRM should have the capability to address the requirements of SMB as well as Enterprise sectors. In real, from my observations none of the SMB focused online CRMs address all the requirements out-of-the-box. Salesforce, ZOHO CRM, Sage CRM, SalesBOOM offer good set of features out-of-the-box, but in a generic level. Salesforce has some ready-made setup to address some verticals, making a good advantage for them. Others need some amount of effort to capture the real work-flow.

An User Interface which is flexible enough to allow a non-expert to capture the work flow is the key for a online CRM system to succeed on a large scale. And this is what I am attempting now. Creating a user-interface which will allow an ordinary sales manager to setup his close-to-perfect capture of his organizational work flow.

- Rajesh Sundaram