crm/project management/helpdesk

Question

My company has been evaluating different crm/project management solutions, hoping to find a solution to our ever increasing workload. I've found some good crm solutions, some good PM solutions, and some good helpdesks, but nothing that integrates well. It seems all the "package deals" that includes all options generally do things rather poorly.

I'm involved in some client sales, a lot of project management, and quite a lot of helpdesk queries. To get an overview of my day I need to keep track of tasks in 3 completely different systems + handle email and calendar. That's tasks/meetings scattered over 5 different places, and I don't feel like I have a good overview of my day. I use a lot of time on just pushing tasks around to make sure I dont forget anything.

What kind of solutions do people use to avoid this? Is there a good "all in one" solution out there that I've missed. Or do people use tools that integrate well with eachother? Or maybe it's my workflow that's the issue.

Answer 1

My team and I have been in the similar situation. We have tested Trello, Asana and many more. In my case I am working with multiple projects in parallel, where every project has different groups of people involved. And, after all the searching, Wrike appeared to be the best option.

I like it as it has a simple and clear dashboard view (with my current and overdue tasks, tasks assigned to others, etc.), Activity Stream and Gantt chart that solved my workload management issue. It also came in very handy for managing our CRM workflow, keeping all our leads and projects in one app. Well, and e-mail integration is my personal favorite (basically, it converts my e-mails into tasks, I just need to add Wrike into the e-mail’s CC and it will be transferred into the app). This, Outlook add-in and couple of more integrations helped us minimize iterations and avoid losing data. Wrike has actually become the “all-in-one” tool we’ve been searching for.

Hope, you’ll find it helpful too. Tell me how it went afterwards.

Answer 2

Microsoft Dynamics Crm 2011 should be able to handle all of this.

It comes with a stack of core functionality which you can then customise and extend to meet your specific requirements. It also have inbuilt integration with Outlook to handle your emails, calendars and tasks.

Client Sales: Mscrm comes with a Sales pipeline, get more information from here and make sure to watch the demo to see how it integrates with Outlook.

Helpdesk: Mscrm comes with a generic 'Customer Service' module, which you can use for helpdesk and support. Info here and demo here.

Project Management: Mscrm does'nt really have anything inbuilt for this, you would need to extend Mscrm for this, that said, Mscrm allows easy customisations (that's not to say it will do everything you want, that's not to say you wont need custom code at times and that's not say its all easy). There's some info here.

Right so that all said, as a little disclaimer: I don't work for Microsoft and I don't get anything out of you buying Mscrm (unless you happen to use my company as an IT consultancy). I also don't know how Mscrm compares to other Crm's out in the market place. However I do know that Mscrm is a very able system.

Hope this helps you to come to an informed decision.

Answer 3

Generally speaking:

• Clients don't care about project management other than "where is my stuff?"
• Clients will generally pester you through email
• Something out-of-the-box is not going to 100% fit what you need (tweaking required)
• Unless everything is in ONE TOOL you have no chance of reducing the data silos and the constant "jumping around" that kills productivity

IMHO, you need three projects:

• Sales/CRM 'lite' = provides a simple sales pipeline/opportunity management.
• Help-desk = incoming email automatically turned in tickets from customers, etc.
• Tracking = for managing tasks with workflow so stuff gets done internally.

Simply link items between those three projects so people get a "connected" view of the business. Don't get hung up on Gantt charts but instead focus on managing simple lists of tasks, tickets and the like. That is what needs managing.

You also need an Outlook connector so that:

• You can one-click turn a client email into a ticket inside the Help-desk project
• You can see in Outlook what is assigned to you
• You can see in an Outlook Calendar when items start/finish

You will probably need to find something that you can implement and tune in days not weeks.

Disclaimer: we use the EXACT same model have depicted above: Sales, Help-desk, Tracking. We build a product called Gemini in an attempt to solve this problem hence bias/opinion is inevitable.

Answer 4

Everyone has their favorite PM / Tracker software, and their least favorite, but this one (JIRA) worked well for a very complex and fast-paced dev shop I used to work for:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/whats-new

Things to note

• It's primarily a bug tracker, so workflows and issue filtering are paramount
• It can be used as a helpdesk service, through email-to-ticket feature, but requires some (non-coding) fenagling
• Medium-sized developer community with many helpful plugins
• Can get pricey, cheaper than most CRM solutions though
• Lots of reporting features and plugins, including Gantt Agile/SCRUM/waterfall OOTB setups

Atlassian makes it, and while their documentation and customer service aren't the best around, they're sufficient enough to get the job done when debugging, and it's a big enough company that they can be considered stable (for CYA protection when things go bad).

I personally wrangled a JIRA instance into being a PM system for 50+ projects (internal and client-facing), with 300+ users in 5-15 depts at any given time, with integrated version control features (tickets could be affected via git commit messages), and we also used it to handle inter-office requests (from printer setups to domain purchases).

In some ways we stretched it a little too far (workflows became incredible complex when too many departments had a say in the process), but in some ways we barely scratched the surface of what it could do (it's reporting features are extremely robust).

It's not always the best idea to make one tool do every job, but when push came to shove, JIRA wasn't the worst choice we could have made, and it ended up looking great to front-end/client users. It's probably a little much for a small group to use, but can handle anything from small to extra-large (1000+ users) org's.

[EDIT: forgot to mention, calendar integration (with iCal especially) was not that great when I used it, many events were either in-JIRA or out-of-JIRA (in iCal, gCal, etc) but it may have been improved in the last two years]

Answer 5

Consider RT. I'm a fan, and expect no material gain from this recommendation. Indeed, since the question is OT for SO I expect to lose rep.