SugarCRM for managing support calls

[alexdp]

Hi to all of you,

Following an Internet search, I have chosen SugarCRM to help me manage info gathered by nurses over the phone while helping callers who are experiencing pain. Once installed (easily), I played with it and now I am not sure if SugarCRM is the best (appropriate) tool for the job at end. I need your help so allow me to briefly describe my project.

A community (free) help center (over the phone) is bringing support to callers who are suffering from chronic pain. Nurses give information and mostly emotional support to callers. "Being able to talk about my pain is really helping" is a frequent comment from callers. There will be 4 to 6 nurses waiting for calls. We do not have or want an elaborate phone setup (phones with no system). At the moment nurses are using paper and pencil to take notes. I would like to manage the info by putting it in a database.

The info needed about the caller is: nurse's name, caller name, phone number, street address, age, gender, etc). Since a caller can come back over time, I would like to manage calls individually. One caller - many calls relation type. Info for call will be: nurse's name, caller name (or a number), object of call, date and time for start and finish call (calculation of duration of call), priority, description of the problem, description of proposed solutions or suggestions, checkboxes for frequent proposed solutions, etc). A user (nurses) table with name, phone number, email, username et password.

The procedure should like this:
Incoming phone call
Check in the database if caller exists
if yes validate data and have a quick look at his previous calls if any
if no create a new record for caller
Create a new call assigned to the caller
Take notes during call (paper or directly in database whichever the nurse prefers)
After the call - complete the call info

I would like to generate reports: number of calls for a specific time period, calls by nurses, most frequent problems (suject of the call), most frequent suggestions, etc.

With the above info, can you tell me if SugarCRM is suitable? If yes, will it be hard to customize? If no, what other solution can you suggest? I am not a programmer. I do not have time to learn php, mysql, etc.

I thank you for reading this post and I hope one of you will be able to help me.

Alex

[greenie]

Alex,

You could consider the following setup:
Create a new user for each nurse,
Allow the nurse to create a new contact for each new caller/patient,
Schedule calls and use notes for each new call.

You would have to add a few custom fields for the callers/contacts eg age and gender. You would have to add a few custom fields in the call activity for priority etc.

The name of the nurse creating the contact would be automatically assigned, so would each new scheduled call and note create by a nurse.

The nurse can easily search the contacts list to see if the caller is already captured. Previous calls and notes on calls can also be searched.

The reports would have to be customised if you are familiar with database reporting tools you could install ZuckerReports which includes a SQL query option which I find the most practical.

Reporting from Sugar may be your greatest challenge if however usually once you have template report you can reuse it using parameters such as start and end date or selected users.

I'm not familiar with other CRM packages but I would imagine that you would always face the issue having to create customised reports.

greenie