One of my first changes that I established at Reclaim Hosting after being hired was moving all of our customer relationship content into Asana. (It was actually one of my first posts, too!) Fast forward a couple of years– I’m now transitioning Reclaim out of Asana and into Suite CRM.
Let me preface this post by saying the following: I love Asana. It has been a great tool to me personally and has been crucial to the inner workings at Reclaim for a while now. I set each university or institution as a “task”, and then separated the accounts into the following “projects”: Current Accounts, Opportunities, & Recycled Accounts. Each task description had the point contact, a link to the initial inquiry support ticket (if we were super organized) & sparse commentary about the account’s who/what/where/when/why. By using tags, assigning users, & setting due dates (i.e. our reminders) the RH team truly squeezed all we could out of the platform.
That said, being open to change is a good thing. Asana is and will always be a list maker, so there’s only so much that we would do with it. And with Reclaim’s steady growth, as well as having no real home for account contracts & files, things started to get messy. Contracts were getting lost in email chains or in the depths of a Dropbox folder, & account timelines and conversations were overlapped or internally miscommunicated.
I wanted to find something that could be a centralized location for all of the above. Enter SuiteCRM. Tim pointed me in the direction of this software through a family member that had been using it successfully, so I began doing a little research. The initial look was comparable in a lot of ways to the pricey powerhouse Salesforce, so when I found out that there’s a free, open source version, I was sold.
You can read about how I manually installed it here.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been customizing CRM for Reclaim’s needs, as well as pulling data out of Asana/Dropbox/Google Drive/Support Tickets & adding it to the new platform. This has been an agonizingly painful process– it’s just like organizing a real-life file cabinet.
At the end of last week, I reached a milestone: I finished moving all current accounts over! I still have to work on the Leads & Recycled Accounts, but I feel like I’m good stopping point where I can document how it’s going. One step at a time, folks!
Suite CRM is highly, highly customizable, which has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. Blessing, because essentially everything can be changed and/or modified to the team’s exact specifications. Curse, because you have to learn how to customize it correctly. If you’re interested in seeing a demo of how the dashboard looks & works head here. (The username & password to log in are both will.)
After tweaking things a bit for Reclaim, the beginning of our account creation has gone from this:
^with absolutely no guidance
To this:
^Nothing above is technically required, but as I’m sure you can imagine, the prompts are helpful. We can link up contacts, files, set reminders, log calls, assign accounts, etc.
Already in the few short weeks of getting going, account info has felt more together, organized, and connected. I can’t wait to see how the RH team adapts to & uses Suite CRM. Will it become more than a file cabinet? Will we start emailing directly from the dashboard? Will we add in the pipeline feature? Time will tell. :)
