I started my first technology company in 1995.  Very quickly I realized the need to properly manage and access customer information.  Over the years I have used programs such as ACT, QuickBooks, GoldMine, SalesGenie, Pivotal, Outlook, Microsoft CRM and other custom applications.  After using these products for a period of time I would find one or more aspects which would make the CRM process difficult, if not impossible. 

In today’s web world, a typical business has several methods by which they may interact with a customer or sales lead.  The difficult task is making sure that the information that is exchanged while interacting with the contact is captured and accessible.  I should clarify what I mean by accessible: easy access to information by various, intuitive methods.  Accessible is not asking the IT person for a custom report or query to show you all emails and phone calls between you and contact x. 

A few years ago I was hired by a company to build a customer portal around their existing CRM application, which happened to be one of the top 5 applications on the market.  This application did offer a customer portal application that would easily integrate with the in house application.  However, it missed a few basic needs.  There was no way to easily capture lead information.  There was no way for a customer to manage their own support tickets.  There was also a $100 per seat license fee that they required for each customer accessing the portal.  In addition, the design and layout for the portal was not flexible at all.  If they purchased the off the shelf portal solution they would end up with 40% of what they needed.  If they built their own we could get to almost 90%.  It took about 9 months to launch the first version of their custom portal and to this day it is still growing.  Keep in mind, this company was not a small business.  They were a multi-million dollar, publicly traded company.  However, the challenges they faced were the same exact challenges that almost every small business either now faces or will soon.  Active CRM eliminates these challenges for the small business. 

Over the past 12 years I have provided consulting services to many small businesses.  All of them needed many of the features that the large scale CRM systems provide, but just couldn’t afford the expense.  The end result was usually a combination of Outlook, Excel, QuickBooks with an occasional custom application in the mix.  There are many CRM applications available on the market today.  Active CRM fills a niche that no other CRM application on the market can do today.  Active CRM was created from the start to be extremely flexible and to easily manage data from external sources.  The main Active CRM application is a stand-alone ASP.NET 2.0 web application with a very robust and intuitive user interface, leveraging the latest in web based technologies.  Active CRM also includes a series of DotNetNuke modules and ASP.NET Web Parts that leverage the Active CRM engine.  This makes it extremely easy to integrate your data with your existing web site.  The end result is a seamless communication experience between your end users and your organization.