LoungeRM – a new approach to CRM

After having written and parsed several CSV files with addresses for various marketing projects, folks in our development team have become extremely agitated as to why nobody makes use of our existing SugarCRM and vTiger instances. We were trying to import our data into vTiger recently – needless to say we didn’t succeed. The answers we got as to why nobody was using CRM systems was unanimous: They are to difficult to use. So we came up with some ideas on how it could be done better and swiftly drafted a blueprint for “our” ideal CRM system. We call it Lounge Relationship Management – we dropped the “C” to set our concept apart and convey the feeling that it is a lighter and more universal approach. Lounge, like it’s database backend CouchDB is an acronym: Lightweight Operative Usable No-SQL Great Efficiency – Relationship Management. There.

What lounge does…

• Contact Management: whose employee was Mr. Smithers, and does he work in corrections?
• Project Supervision: who send what when to whom, and did we get a response?
• Action Tracking: Did Lisa call Mr. Burns and verify that meeting date?

Based on a simple yet extensible backend, LoungeRM can adapt easily to your requirements. Need a field for numbers of children? Simply add it to the contact. Not happy with the fields provided for actions? Just rename them.

… and what it doesn’t.
LoungeRM is an attempt to provide an easy, quick and light solution in a market full of highly inflated tools – our favourite antagonist is SugarCRM. We do not want to build a “customer relations invoice project management employee accounting solutions provider” thing. That’s why we call it “RM” only. It is not necessarily for customers, you could use it to track pets or employees or the status of tools, computers, planes, rental equipment, anything really that can be represented by our data model. Taking the perception that existing tools are to inflated and have to much overhead for the average user, we focus on an easy-to-use interface which can be handled while on the phone, in a meeting or on a mobile device without having to spend hours on writing one report. The time used to document an action should not be longer than the process itself.

We will shortly provide some first screenshots,