Customer management database

Question

I work in a small company that gets around 600 new contacts every year (via email or contact forms). Right now, we are keeping all contacts information in an Excel sheet that we share on Dropbox, where my colleagues can make edits, but this is becoming very difficult to manage (i.e. impossible to follow old contacts when their status gets updated, and to track who made changes).

I am looking for an alternative that:

• stores contacts data (name, email, question, status updates),
• shows the latest updates (who updated what and when),
• allows simultaneous editing from multiple machines
• is easy to use, and possibly open source and free

Bonus functions: calendar with reminders, possibility of associating files to each customer.

This would be for internal use only, no customer interaction whatsoever, and all information would be manually added by me and colleagues. No need for functions like tickets, chat, analytics etc.

Answer 1

I am not sure if you are after a free CRM system (I know you said open source and free), or are willing to pay - I will base my opinion off using both free and paid. You also did not really state the nature of your customers, so this would change my overall answer. I would suggest perhaps trying Really Simple Systems which you can try from this website. (Please be aware I trialled this program at one point for my own personal use, but will not make any references from this.)

If you look into their price comparison section, I think the following is of use:

For free use, you get 100 "sales accounts", with flexible payment options. Note that a sales account is defined as:

An Account is a company or organisation that you deal with, including your customers and prospects

Unlimited contacts, which are defined as:

Contacts are the people who work in your Accounts

Availability to add custom fields to a customer record, defined as:

Add new fields and change existing fields to Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns etc

Cross platform support on Tablet and Phone, as:

Works seamlessly on smartphones and tablets

Limited Outlook intergration, with the following restrictions:

Sync your Outlook Calendar with Tasks in the CRM. Works with Outlook365 and hosted Exchange only.

Lastly, Google Integration:

Sync the Contacts in your CRM with Google Contacts, and then to your smartphone.

Utilizing the custom fields, allows you to run your own custom reports (supported with the free versions) and store a limited 100MB of data.

Personally, I had no issues using the free version, and it was backed with full support. I will attach some other reviews of the product from third party websites to allow you to get a full grasp:

GR Crowd Software Advice CRM Idol

What does this cover?

• Free
• Stores Contact Data (to a degree)

What doesn't this cover?

• Possible multi-user access
• Latest update list
• Open Source

I hope this helps you.