This is a guest post by Kaila West.
Customer relationship management, or CRM, applications can get rather costly for some of the highest level, professional versions. Think in the range of $2,500 per application and up depending on factors like numbers of users, location of users, and volume of customers and their data required for the business to manage.
For those with less budget than will allow for buy-in to such systems, there is a lower cost solution available. Search engine giant, Google, has developed its own cloud computing platform known as the Google Apps Engine. These applications are conveniently located in their Apps Marketplace and have the added benefit of plugging into the business account of other various Google powered applications. Google Apps which may be familiar are the business branded version of Gmail, the Google Docs suite of word processing and spreadsheet functionality, Calendar, and a host of other free apps.
By creating the App Engine and Marketplace, Google has made it easy for developers to produce relevant business applications they can sell. These applications provide for the business to maintain single user sign on accounts. This means once a company has signed up for a Google Apps account, users can be added for appropriate personnel within the business.
If the company has need for, say, a CRM application, their administrator can peruse the list of CRM apps available within the Marketplace and easily integrate that app into their existing suite, at the ready for all users on the system.
Following is a brief list of some stand out CRM applications available for integration into the business’ existing Apps infrastructure. Administrators will also be happy to learn that both user accounts and application details are easily maintained within their control panels.
9 Top Google CRM Apps
- Insightly: Insightly is the most popular Google Apps CRM and Project Management package. Track leads, proposals, opportunities, projects and manage files, all through an easy to use interface. Link to Google App page.
- Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM offers businesses a complete customer relationship life-cycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management. Link to Google App page.
- Capsule CRM: Capsule is a simple, flexible CRM for small businesses and sales teams. Capsule makes it easy to keep track of your customers and other contacts, your sales opportunities and follow-ups. Link to Google Apps page.
- Applane: Applane CRM is an enterprise CRM that supports complete sales cycle and customer relationship. It has very efficient user interface with context menu and many advanced features. It is hosted on GAE. Link to Google Apps page.
- eStreamDesk Helpdesk: eStreamDesk is a flexible helpdesk and ticketing platform that enables support staff to easily manage many requests from multiple services and e-mail addresses. Link to Google Apps page.
- Timetonote: Simple, Fast and Elegant CRM. Collaborate and share contacts, notes, tasks, projects and more with your co-workers. Features include: Google Contacts + Gmail + Calendar integration, Affordable, Secure: your data on Google’s infrastructure & SSL. Link to Google Apps page.
- Assistly: Assistly makes it easy for teams and Whole Companies to support customers right from the helpdesk. Tame overflowing inboxes and support customers via email, phone, chat, web, Facebook and Twitter. Link to Google Apps page.
- BatchBook Social CRM:BatchBook is a lightweight but powerful CRM that allows you to easily organize contacts, monitor social networks and track leads and deals. BatchBook allows you to keep track of your business, personal, and social networking contacts and share them with the rest of your team. You can create a flexible, easy-to-use contact database from scratch, or import your contacts from an existing system. Link to Google Apps page.
- PipelineDeals: PipelineDeals provides you with the easiest way to manage your sales pipeline. Sales teams use PipelineDeals to manage deal flow, track leads, run reports and close more deals. Link to Google Apps page.
This guest post is by Kaila West, a writer for a CRM Social Media, a social CRM blog which covers the art of using social media for customer relationship management.
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It’s also great because by making a few development tweaks to allow google apps integration, you enhance the usability of any app to also include things like Gmail integration, google docs collaboration, and other perks.
WORKetc launched an integration campaign with Google apps recently as well. They already integrate CRM, project management, and billing into one system, so with the added google mail and google docs integration the system can do a heck of a lot for SMBs. They recently released a ‘WORKetc gmail gadget’ – a tool which sits inside of gmail and allows for in depth worketc functionality without even opening the app.