Integrating Sage CRM with your website can be a practical way to eliminate duplicate entry, capture more data, and generally be more efficient.
Sage CRM website integration is a project we do all the time is to pull inquiries from a ‘contact us’ page into Sage – which then issues a thank you email to the submitter and notifies sales.
In our experience, this is practical if/when you are getting over 30 inquiries per month.
This type of project usually involves 3 key elements:
1. Creating the form that pulls inquiries into your Sage CRM instance.
2. Setting up a workflow to control the progression of the lead once it arrives in Sage CRM.
3. Configuring any related reports and dashboards.
Sometimes there is a good case to allow people outside of your organization to interact with your Sage CRM instance. Examples include dealers, customers, suppliers, really whomever your organization interacts with that does not have direct access to your Sage CRM instance.
Sage CRM includes a portal feature referred to as ‘Web-Self-Service’. While the Web-Self-Service database is created when Sage CRM is initially installed, you should consider it just your starting point. Out-of-the-box, it does not do a whole lot beyond allowing users to view and submit cases, however, the framework that it provides has massive potential. The 2 leading Sage CRM development partners (CRM Together and Greytrix) have created add-ons for Web-Self-Sevice that really take the concept to another level.
At My CRM Manager, we have created portal solutions ourselves using the Web-Self-Service framework but in recent years we have switched to using either the Greytrix or CRM Together solutions. We do this because it is so much more cost-effective to use these (relatively) inexpensive add-ons than to start from scratch.
The example provided in this video was with EcoWater. This portal (from 2008) was not as slick as any of our more recent projects but was very functional. Additionally, there were French and English entry points to accommodate their strong presence in Quebec. In the video, Penelope does a good job of explaining the business logic of the system and why it made sense for them.
