[ERPNext-Roadmap/Open Discussion] Lets Do Improvement on CRM Module

ERPNext Selling/CRM
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Hi Everyone,

As all of us aware that we are trying to make a development roadmap to improve/expand our ERPNext CRM capability according to community wishes, so lets discuss it and talk about it here in our forum.

In my opinion, When we are talking about CRM, we are talking about a broad range of ecosystem of data that give insights, views, drive to plan and execute our Sales operations.

The topic itself its broad that i think that if we talk about a full fledged CRM then we are talking about a project not more less than building an ERP itself.

CRM itself its not only LEAD, OPPORTUNITY, CONTACT, CUSTOMER Management but a concept on how to know your customer, learn about their behaviour, changes and Interactions, for us to deliver their needs and to empower our company to have better decision/ insight tools to run the sales operation.

So there is this part that ERP and CRM intersect but also there are some parts that ERP and CRM don’ts. Lets look at this: http://www.digitalconnectmag.com/why-your-business-cant-succeed-without-a-crm/

However generally speaking of feature, we can split CRM as a 4 Main Feature of “Customer & Sales Management” . “Marketing Management”, “Salesforce Management” and “Customer Support”.

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My Idea is that we can first make a development roadmap on each of this 4 main feature we think we like and start a discussion to decide maybe 2-3 feature we shall add to ERPNext CRM.

Some of the feature are:

Sales & Customer Management:
1. Customer Score card – can give you info about your customer grades so you can concentrate on customers
2. Multi Level Discount – Discount can be added on 1 field lets say 30%+20%+60%+10%
3. Percentage based sales invoice – Bill invoices by percentage lets say Down payment 10% Payment 80% Retention 10% with different SI due date
4. Please add more ….

Marketing Automation:
1. Campaign Extension – To measure the company marketing campaign and the outcome from it with
accounting & budgeting integration
2. Membership & Rewards Mgmt. — Make customer part of your family (Frequent flyer programe etc.). So that customer like “Lady Gaga” is happy and does not delete its ERPNext account.
account.
3. Social Media Connector – Next Step Marketing is Social Media ( Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Path, LINE, etc you name it).
4. On line market connector – example: Integrate with Magento etc.
5. Please add more….

Sales Partner Atuomation:
1. CRM Dashboard 360 – Dashboard for the most dynamic person in the company.
2. Mobile UI for Salesforce – High mobility needs dedicated platform.
3, Scheduler, Task, Activity – Integrate ERPNext “Task”, “Schedule”, “Activity” with CRM
4. Your itch here……

Support Management:
1. Enhanced Email Inbox – Proposed by Aditya Duggal
2. Calling Integration – Proposed by Pawan
3. Reminder & Follow up – Claim reminder & follow up
4. Chat Engine Integration – Chat engine inside support module
5. Your Idea’s here.

Please feel free to add or to deduct all the idea listed above and please think in the generic way as this would be useful for us as also for the community.
Also i attached some of my thoughts for refference:

https://youtu.be/52NJQoO34ns

Thank you
Anton

“If you want to go fast go alone, If you want to go far go together”
“Unity in Diversity”
@rmehta, @JayRam, @adityaduggal, @Pawan @komsel2228 @jpp @umair

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I too am very interested in improving CRM and email handling. There have been a number of small and not so small bugs I’ve identified that Frappe have kindly fixed under my support contract with them.

I need to digest fully and review what you have said before but I believe email composing and replying can be improved. For example small things such as you cannot post inline to form a reply you can only top post.
The means to ‘save’ a long draft email would be a great feature that one of my staff requested. The email conversation history prior to version 8 used to remove much of the unwanted cruft but seems to be long form.
Also you can Delete an email and Trash an email . I might understand why but I’m not sure my users understand the difference.
If you are on an email in inbox there is no easy way to move to the next email

There are a number of oddities that could be improved to enhance the appeal to general users.

A few small suggestions …

I am willing to contribute to this work

Julian

1 Like
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It would be nice to see some improvements on the CRM module.
A while ago there was a thread on the improving the email inbox https://discuss.frappe.io/t/email-inbox-experience/24185/15 and I suggested the following.

  • Display clearly the contact, and other documents the email is linked to (like the way sales documents are displaying related documents at the top of the form as a dashboard).
  • Make it possible to links emails to other documents many to many. (it often happens that in one email multiple projects / sales documents / products are discussed)
  • Only editable body and subject field when your composing an email not when reading.
  • Be able to group emails belonging to one conversation in a treeview and show all communications, documents etc. under contact / suplier/ customer.
  • Fix the CSS display faults
  • Be able to make an task, appointment, quotation and sales order direct from email.
  • Be able to easy set an reminder within a certain amount days if there hasn’t been a reply from the contact.
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I agree as Email is an important factor as part of CRM and i have seen a lot of request to improve/extend ERPNext Email.
as i have seen in some of this post:
additional link for email communication request are:

So as i am making a feature list for email extension and improvement what i can compile are:

  1. post inline in the strings so that reply are linked
  2. Save a long draft for email
  3. Delete and Trash email.
  4. Linked document to contact and other document that email is linked to single or multiple doctype.
  5. Email communication tree for a contact (supplier/customer)
  6. Make task, appointment, quotation, sales order and other from email.
  7. Set reminder for email or task if hasn’t fulfilled.
  8. Calendar Integrations
  9. …
  10. …
  11. …

So this is some of the feature list for email development.
Lets make the feature list and we can start breaking down into several stages of development and
then we can choose to prioritize which feature that we can develop first.

Like that we will have a good working plan to propose a public beta for this.
I personally also interested in contributing to this work also.

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Lets do a sprint / beta on this in Dec ‘17

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I think the actual implementation about Party (supplier, customer diferent doctypes) limit a good CRM implementation.
There were already talks about this (ex: Companies contact besides customer/supplier - #4 by rmehta ) and github issues.
To have a better implementation of a CRM there should be an Party Doctype and if there is a wave of development for CRM this is a good thing to the roadmap.

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Hey,
Thanks for your suggestion,

I aslo think that party doctype is a good addition to ERPNext. But I think we have to consult with the community for this as
this will make substantial change in the code for ERPNext (as sales person, selling agent, banks, employee, franchisee, are all party) we are looking for a broad change in the core.

I think we can keep this open and lets see how this itch will develop…

1 Like
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I know, this is not developing a new feature is enhance the existing one, but IMO that’s should be the job of the Foundation.
Yes it is a big change, but also a very important and I fear that no one will start this alone. :frowning:

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Hi All,

As we goes deeper into the plan of extending and improving the capabilities of the ERPNext CRM and as well to respond to @rmehta call for the Module Community. [Organization] Module Leaders + Public Beta / Sprints

We are making a call here for your idea/contribution for extending the CRM module of ERPNext.

For now we have @kolate_sambhaji, @Julian_Robbins and me that has volunteered to make an improvement of this module.

Anybody interested in contributing are greatly welcome as your participation/idea/input/time/expertise are greatly needed and are welcome.

Lets do a draft for the first project of the “email improvement” and set a working schedule so that this planning can go into reality.

For now the temporary list are:

post inline in the strings so that reply are linked
Save a long draft for email
Delete and Trash email.
Linked document to contact and other document that email is linked to single or multiple doctype.
Email communication tree for a contact (supplier/customer)
Make task, appointment, quotation, sales order and other from email.
Set reminder for email or task if hasn’t fulfilled.
Calendar Integrations
SMS auto alert - new input from @kolate_sambhaji 
Please add your idea here...

…
…
…

Thanks and best regards
Anton

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Hello Anton

One other useful feature that could be added.

  • Means to move from email to next or previous email to avoid extra clicks.

I’m sure there’s more but this one is email navigation is really important
and would enhance the usability a lot

  • A minor one … The Email Inbox is situated under the Menu of ‘Setup’
    which is incorrect and hopefully not difficult to fix

Look forward to getting involved further

Julian

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Thanks Julian,

I have input your ideas into the list bucket:

  1. post inline in the strings so that reply are linked
  2. Save a long draft for email
  3. Delete and Trash email.
  4. Linked document to contact and other document that email is linked to single or multiple doctype.
  5. Email communication tree for a contact (supplier/customer)
  6. Make task, appointment, quotation, sales order and other from email.
  7. Set reminder for email or task if hasn’t fulfilled.
  8. Calendar Integrations
  9. SMS auto alert - new input from @kolate_sambhaji
  10. Add button for next/previous in the email doctype for faster browsing
  11. Change email inbox location
  12. …

Hey,I think next/previous doctype button are quite generic and can be implemented in the other area of the module lets say “sales order”, “purchase order”, etc for easy browsing. I like that too…
Just my one cent comment…

Regards

Anton

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How about, automatic visit/appointment logging using this -

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@LifeP: I think geolocation is also a great idea, we can integrate that into many aspects of ERPNext such as tracking, appointment, delivery, and other aspect. I will put that into the list for requirements for the CRM building.

Thanks
Anton

1 Like
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Hi Everyone,

Following our updates on the CRM improvement roadmap planning, I am glad that today we as foundation had formed a working committee of volunteers who share the same passion to improve ERPNext CRM module. So that we can start working in improving the CRM and having an improvement plan to be implemented in ERPNext core.

I myself feels greatly humbled and honoured to be a part of that and also excited and yes … grateful that i can learn with all of you together to improve ERPNext.

So as for now what I would start by saying “Thank You” for all of us who volunteered and contribute and also “Good Luck” for us all who is going to contribute and improve the CRM Module. All of your input will be valuable for us to develop and extend CRM of ERPNext.

With Regards & Respect
Anton
@umair, @Julian_Robbins, @olamide_shodunke, @jayfiro, @LifeP, @Bas_de_Reus, @almeidapaulopt

5 Likes
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Hi,
I’m new in this community and I started using Erpnext for trial. I am a marketing consultant specialized in marketing automation. I saw you want implement new features into CRM, and also automation. There is only one open source marketing automation platform and is called Mautic, I was thinking that some developer can use Mautic code to create a starting point for automation workflows, scoring, website tracking, html email editor, ecc. and in the future add some different features that Mautic hasn’t (I think that for new features, Activecampaign can be a source of inspiration).
PS: It’s only a suggestion and I don’t know if the different licences allow these kind of uses.

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@tara_antonius do you think it could be done?

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hi thanks for your suggestion, i will check on the requirement and inform you asap

regards,
anton

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I know that we are going to start to work on an intergration into Mautic as soon as we can start it.

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Foundation recently formed marketing group for ERPNext Marketing activity.
Do you want to take lead in Marketing Group?

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Hi @kolate_sambhaji
wow it’s very interesting. Yes, add me to the Marketing Group.
Thanks

2 Likes