Account or Customer Centric? Which is Sugar?

[thisisyoyo]

Greetings All.

I came across a posting online about there being 2 uses of CRM 1 being Account Centris and the Other being Customer Centric.

Obviously some companies may use either or/both. After giving this thought I can't tell where to define SugarCRM?

What do you consider it?

Now that brings me to how can I use SugarCRM to be customer centric? I only manage customers and sell services. So what happens with the Accounts tab? Even some fields in Sugar require Accounts to be created so what to do?

If you are a user with customer and selling services rather than products and tracking Accounts how are managing this.

Are you using Accounts at all? If you are not how do you manage the areas that require accounts??

Any advise helps before I jump in and start entering data.

[longreach]

I think when you use the word customer, you seem to mean an individual person, rather than a business. A consumer, if you like. If you are indeed wanting to use a CRM to sell to consumers, and not to businesses (i.e. Accounts) then you should at least read some of the threads in these forums that involve a discussion of B2B vs B2C - then you will see some of the tradeoffs involved for SugarCRM in that area.

[Ram Kumar]

Hello:

If you think Account is a company and customer is a Contact,

SugarCRM is a Account Centric or Company Centric.

But if your business is a B2C and for you Customer / Individual is the central point, SugarCRM can be easily converted into Customer Centric.

We did implement to one our clients where their client base is "High Networth Indivduals". This is a capital advisory company whose clients are all indviduals who have high networth.

We converted the Account into "Client" tab and customized it to take individual information instead of company information. And it worked perfectly well as everything now revolves around the customer.

You can try it out customizing Sugar through Studio to achieve this.

With Warm Regards

Ram Kumar
http://www.bhea.co.in