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About portal software, intranet development and extranet
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iport4business Ltd
Suite2, Airdrie Business Centre
Airdrie ML6 6GX
Scotland
United Kingdom
T: 01236 439447
E: info@iport4business.com
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Contact Management System as a Portal Application
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Many organisations have a need to store information about their contacts and relationships with other organisations and/or individuals. In the software business, this is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and can extend into tracking sales and service calls.
There are already a wide range of Customer Relationship Management CRM products on the market but these applications can be rigid to work with and expensive to deploy. In short, you have to adapt your process to suit them or they won't work for you.
That's what makes portals such powerful tools.
With the correct portal software, you can customise the system to suit your processes rather than the other way round. You can set up procedures to manage all your contacts, whether they are linked to an organisation or not. You can totally configure the system to store exactly what you need to store about these contacts and organisations too and you can even pull information about these contacts and organisations from other systems such as your finance systems.
Knowledge about contacts: your customers; staff; suppliers and business partners, is critical to every business or organisation.
Basic Requirements for Portal Based Contact Management
For quite some time in the late 90s, the” Next Big Thing” being touted in IT was Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. To read the hype, you had to wonder what organisations did before CRM was coined. Yet every organisation, commercial or not for profit, has to manage the relationships it has with other organisations and individuals: be they customers, associates, affiliates, members, employees, consultants etc.
And they had to do it long before CRM software was developed.
But that's not to say that software can't help out and even improve the process.
At the heart of every good portal solution is a powerful relationship management model. In fact, you can easily say that most of what we do when designing portal applications revolves around managing relationships between different data sources, no matter the origin, and presenting that data to the user in an easy to use format.
Good portal software is, in effect, Relationship Management software in it's truest sense. But don't confuse portals with a CRM software product. They are more, much more; in terms of capability and functionality, not to mention integration, cost per seat, flexibility…
This relationship management capability goes to the heart of contact management. Many contact management systems start with the premise that organisations have relationships with other organisations. That is not true: individuals within organisations have relationships with individuals in other organisations. And it is these individual interactions that need to be tracked and managed as well as the macro relationships of Customer and Supplier.
The organisational relationship management is still important, of course, but the intricacies of the individual relationships cannot be overlooked either.
What do you need to know about organisations?
Let's start then with the most common relationships and contacts of all – those between organisations.
Portal software normally comes with a basic ability to store an organisation name and multiple addresses for that organisation. However, most organisations want to store more information about customers, suppliers, membership etc than a mere name and address.
This is where Classifications and Profiles comes in: basically you need to be able to group together data fields (Classifications) into a picture of the organisation (Profile) so that information can be shared. Some of the common data stored is:
- URL – to store the web site address of the organisation
- Main business – a drop down list to describe the business in general terms. You could also use a Standard Industry Code (SIC) here but in our experience these are not accurate enough on their own. Many organisations with a manufacturing SIC code, for example, also distribute and resell.
- Business description – to better describe in free text the organisation and what it does.
- No of employees – in most cases, the number of employees will give an indication of the sise (and perhaps suitability as a customer) of the organisation
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- Revenues – as above.
- Free phone/Toll free number.
- Sales relationship – a way of categorising the relationship from a selling perspective.
You should be able to add new fields and options to these portal Profiles at any time. You may, for example, want to store and record the Financial Year End of an organisation: this should easily be added to the profile and will then be available to all users who have authority.
Of course it is crucial that this profile information is updated constantly. Some of it is easy to get -- web addresses and telephone numbers -- but some is not so easy. Things like revenues and number of employees are not always easy to find out as many organisations treat that information as private and sensitive. Large corporations, of course, publish it and it is easier to get hold of.
In our experience, a rolling program of “data cleaning” should be instigated on your contact management system to make sure that you are as up to date as possible. Things change. Stay on top of it.
Also, one of the best sources of information that you have is your customer service and/or sales teams. They are talking to customer and potential customers all the time and collecting information as they go. Make sure that they are primed to ask key questions whilst on the phone or face to face. In fact, getting really sensitive information is extremely easy face to face and is the time to get valuable details on revenues etc.
One last key point: although this guide focuses on building up Classifications and Profiles within your portal, it is also possible to link into your existing software or contact management system. For example, let's say that a key piece of information was a customer's outstanding order value and this information was held in your finance system. You should be able to link your portal software in to your finance software to automatically read that data in and display it when you load the organisation's Profile. The same can be said for any of the other data sets: name, address, email details, telephone etc.
Chic McSherry
CEO
iport4business Ltd
June 2005
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