“CRM for Small Business” has been slightly neglected this year, as I’ve been working extra hard getting Leopard CRM, (web based CRM software for small business) off the ground.  We’re almost about to release version 3, which is pretty exciting, so we’ve been busy scurrying around getting it ready for launch.

As this site was looking slightly old and out of date, I’ve just installed the latest version of Wordpress, some additional comment spam filtering (much needed) and I’ve installed a new theme.  Do you like it?  I think it looks pretty nice.

Hopefully once Leopard CRM version 3 is out, there wil be more time to contribute to this blog.

Over at Leopard CRM, CRM software for small business, we’ve made some important changes:

• A new About Us page has been added to the site.
• A new release is about to appear featuring the new sales analysis system.

So, if you haven’t already seen what Leopard CRM can do, I encourage you to go over and check it out.

Well folks, the company that I established in January 2006, Leopard Software (AKA Kingdom Solutions Pty Ltd) has just launched its flagship product, a new CRM software system called: Leopard CRM.

Leopard CRM holds the same name as my previous Open Source CRM product, but there is nothing else in common between them except the name. The new Leopard CRM is a hosted CRM solution that is available to Australian small and medium sized businesses.

The software has been in design stage in my head for about 5-6 years, and it has been in development for approximately the last 18 months. We’re really excited that we finally get to offer it to the general public as a final product.

Imagine the piece of mind that you would have by having your business streamlined and efficient with increased customer loyalty and staff morale. Imagine the excitement you would feel in being able to look to the future growth of your business knowing that you had efficient systems in place to help make it happen. This is what Leopard CRM aims to do for your business.

For more information, about this exciting CRM software offering, check out www.leopardcrm.com.

I heard a rumour that Google had released a CRM product, so I decided to scour the Net to find out what it could do. It looks fairly capable, but I’m not too sure about the interface. As this is a beta application, I’m sure that improvements are going to be made, but at the moment, it seems to suffer from an identity crisis.

From the example you can see that Google have included it into their homepage system. Now, I can’t imagine that this would be a wise choice as information is designed to be presented as a “homepage” and it doesn’t really work for CRM.

Maybe more investigation is needed to find out exactly what Google has planned (if they’re even sharing this kind of information). Software as a Service vendors may have something to worry about if Google seriously decide to step into this ring.

I know that sometimes we need to deal with complex problems, markets and processes. But, one simple thing stays the same, customers want service. It doesn’t matter if the price is cheap, customers still want some kind of service. I was thinking this over, and thought, in relation to CRM software, less can be more. If things are kept simple, then staff have the freedom to serve the customer. If we control processes too tightly, then customers hear the phrase “I’m sorry, but it’s against our policy”, and customers don’t want to hear that, so they won’t be coming back.

When solving certain problems, CRM needs to have a level of complexity, but let’s not forget the simple things, as they can make all the difference.