Practical Tips that Enhance vTiger CRM Implementation
Are you thinking of implementing vTiger CRM for your business needs? Or are you already reaping the benefits of vTiger – a strong suite of CRM functionalities seamlessly integrated with your existing systems? Then this blog is just right for you.
vTiger is a veritable treasure trove of features and integrations that make it a compelling CRM. The fact that it is absolutely free and open source simply makes it irresistible when compared to other powerful but expensive CRM systems like SalesForce. However in order to extract total advantage you need to know a few basic tips that will help you achieve high degree of RoI when you introduce vTiger CRM to your organization. In this blog, we will look at practical ways in which you can utilize the prowess of vTiger to maximum effect.
1. Outgoing server – vTiger has a built-in end-to-end e-mail system that offer all functionalities of mail like bulk e-mail, individual e-mail, user information authentication, notifications and alerts, rules, and WordFlow e-mails. It uses the SMTP server setting to send/receive mails. If you are using an open source version of vTiger, you can configure Gmail SMTP by enabling support for SSL in PHP. The below are some details that needs to be entered to complete the e-mail server setup –
Server Name: ssl://smtp.gmail.com:465
Username: <Gmail-id@gmail.com>
Password: <Gmail password>
From Email: Here you need to specify a ‘from’ e-mail Id separate from current user’s e-mail Id
Requires Authentication: Checked as ‘Yes’
2. Data view customization – In order to achieve quick results and reports, it is important to customize the data view as per your specific reporting needs. This is especially important when you migrate from a different CRM system to vTiger to make the migration seamless. If you had a Company record being displayed for opportunities, organizations, leads, or e-mails, then you might be taken aback by the plain ‘more info’ tab presented by vTiger by default. However there is a quick and easy turnaround for this problem. Simply navigate to Settings ->Other Settings ->Default Module View ->Enable Singlepane View to show all information on a single window pane.
3. Data import facility – vTiger has excellent compatibility with most of the major spreadsheet solutions like excel, CSVs or text. A best practice is to save the files as CSV before passing it to vTiger. However make sure that the source file is properly formatted os that it doesn’t later the data when being converted to CSV. For instance large numbers (telephone/mobile numbers) in Excel gets converted to scientific notation when converted to CSV format. If it is imported into CSV with this wrong format, the resultant vTiger reports/data views to would carry this same error.
4. Customizing Workflows – Workflows help you schedule tasks at various point of time. This helps you to get your focus out of routine or recurring tasks and focus on core project, people or process management. After associating a workflow to a record, it will get triggered when any update or edit is made to the record (addition of fields or modification of fields). Upon encountering these triggers the workflow will carry out the desired actions (send an e-mail, create a to-do event, invoke notifications, schedule report generation, or update a field). On vTiger the best way to automate such routine processes is to use the Workflow cron script. However it is set to disabled by default. In this scenario you can easily subscribe to an almost free cron job service such as www.setcronjob.com that does this at just $10 per year.
5. New user setup – Being a multi-user system, vTiger sends out automated mail when a new user account is added to the system. The mail itself is very basic with quite a good scope of customization by modifying the underlying PHP file located at Modules/Users/Save.php.
You have to search for the text “// send email on Create user only if NOTIFY_OWNER_EMAILS”. Here the below line
‘$subject = $mod_strings[‘User Login Details’];’
.. which could be changed to
$subject = “Customized User Login Details”;
You can also tweak the name that appears in the salutation of the mail by editing the $email_body variable.
Got any other hot tips to make the most of the amazing array of features offered by vTiger? Then write in to us and share your views.
At Veepal IT services, we are helping our clients to achieve the goal of their business through our CRM development services and providing best solution to the enterprise. Feel free to contact us today about Vtiger crm development.
