Open Source Customer Relationship Management Solutions

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: In order to stay ahead of the competition companies are more and more forced to turn their attention to their real assets: their customers. Both, the value of the individual customer and the development of personalized relationships with them have made customer relationship management as one of the emerging topics in the last years. Faced with the increased knowledge of the customers about existing product- and service offerings on the market, companies are more than ever required to develop specific customer knowledge in order to adapt their products and services according to the requirements of the customer. Customer relationship management is no longer something that only huge leading enterprises use in order to gain a competitive advantage. In the increased competitive landscape, it is now a necessity for survival even for small and medium-sized enterprises. Customer relationship management is a complex and difficult way of doing business. CRM means more than just installing a software or automating customer touch points. It is about the reinvention of a customer-oriented organization. According to the special requirements of small and medium-sized businesses, the degree of difficulty of the CRM approach even increased. The following Bachelor’s Thesis reveals the overall importance of a customer relationship management system especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition to the topic of CRM, the increasing importance and possibilities of open source software is revealed. The main research question consists of the idea if open source customer relationship management systems are able to fulfill the requirements of a CRM software. In order to be able to answer this question, the following Bachelor’s Thesis made use of the literature available on the topics CRM, special requirements of small and medium-sized enterprises, and the topic of open source software. By revealing what a CRM have to fulfill in order to be classified as customer relationship management system according to the findings in the literature, various requirements are identified. In the next step, the three most popular open source CRM software systems Sugar CRM, vTiger, and OpenCRX are scrutinized under the criteria if they are able to fulfill the requirements defined in the previous steps. The conclusion discusses the previous findings and outlines the chances and limits of open source customer relationship management [...]