Introduction to Holmes CRM, menus and modules (customer care, product catalog, sales, inventory, billing) and the Console.

This video shows the main menus and the console of Holmes CRM application. This is a desktop application, for a better user experience. It is a "multiple document" interface, so you can have more than one document opened at once, and switch from one another without the delay typical of web applications. It is not designed for occasional use, but for daily work on a desktop environment.

The main modules in Holmes CRM are:

• Customer Care: Interactions, cases, customer accounts, sites, contacts, hierarchical accounts, marketing campaigns...
• Sales: Campaigns, contracts, meetings, projects, opportunities, leads, quotes, orders, tasks...
• Product Catalog: Product definition, product packages, service definitions, etc...
• Billing: Invoices, invoice sections, invoice details...
• Inventory: Inventories, Warehouses, Product batches, etc.
• Administration: Set up of employees, work in progress bins (folders), shared queues for pending work, employee groups, document templates, alerts...
• System: Internal objects such as modules, classes, fields, descriptions, relationships, lists, etc.

Menus, modules, document types, document fields, labels, look and feel, behaviors, etc. are extensible and can be customized.

This video shows how to create and search accounts in Holmes CRM.

Accounts are billable entities, so they have a Tax Id, billing address, etc.

Sites are physical locations (offices, residences) where goods or services are delivered, contacts are located, etc. An account may have a number of associated sites.

Contacts are persons associated to a site, normally members of the customer organization, be it a business or a family.

In this video, we show how to create a new account, and how to find it later on.

Interactions are used to manage interactions with customers, such as telephone calls. Interactions can be linked directly to accounts, or to contacts, depending on business needs.

Cases are used to manage work to be done behind the scenes, normally following a customer interaction.

This is what we call "backoffice". Eventually, different teams that do not talk directly with customers, are involved in resolving issues or fulfilling customer requests, such as engineers, billing clerks, legal (god forbid!)...

So we define Queues and WIP bins to organize the work. By dispatching the cases to queues, we can organize the work effectively, as someone (and only one) who is assigned to that queue, will take care of it. When the work is done, the case will be in our team's queue.

We can see a variety of other documents related to accounts, such as invoices, meetings, purchased products, etc.

But if that's not enough, accounts support attachments, so we can attach any media (audio, video, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.) to the account records.

Holmes CRM supports managing simple marketing campaigns.

A marketing campaign is just a collection of accounts (and/or leads), which is given a name and a description, status, creation time, etc. More fields can be added if necessary depending on the business needs.

The account's "marketable phone" field allows to track which accounts have been contacted, and the outcome.

We can associate both accounts and leads to a campaign, as well as survey definitions, to guide the agent, in case of telemarketing campaigns.

Campaigns are used also to launch mass mailing, of course, we must abide by local laws about unsolicited e-mail, which normally requires the authorization of the recipients to receive e-mail from our company. To do that, we define a document template which will be customized using the account data.

In this short video, we create a new campaign, associate accounts and update the marketable phone status to track progress.

The following video is a Business Support System (BSS) for a chemical engineering company. The full business case is described here.

Every project has a list of chemical products which are purchased from a supplier and sold to a customer.

The so called "financial details" represent the economic details of the project, purchase terms (amounts, units, price, incoterm) and the offering terms.

Technical details of the projects are recorded as attachments (spreadsheets, engineering studies, etc.) so these do not require specific forms in the application

The system allows to track the project status, store and make searches on accounts, projects, products, quotes, invoices, etc.

From the project information, and the economic details, the quote, purchase order and customer invoice is generated by the system, saving the time to copy the details manually

Although simple, the solution allows to:

• check the projects status (ongoing, win, lost)
• Check which projects/customers have acquired a certain product, and the conditions of past offers (price, terms)
• Managing tasks associated to projects, with escalation alerts if the due date is reached.
• History of quotes, purchase orders, invoices
• Generation of printable documents
• Managing the product catalog
• Managing the customer interactions, cases, and all the other "out-of-the-box" features of Holmes CRM

How to use Holmes CRM to manage events where one or multiple customers take part.

This use case is relevant to businesses that manage appointments with customers, either individual or collectively.

For instance, organizing events such as dive centers or sport clubs do, trainings for academies, etc. 

The implementation in Holmes is really simple. Just create the event and link it to customers.

Or from the customer view, in the meetings tab, select and link an existing event, or create and link a new event.

From the event view, you can browse the participants. From the customer view, you can see all the events in which the customer took part (or will take part).

That simple.

Simple use case where we create products and assign product items to a customer account.

In this example, we are defining one standalone product. It is possible to group products into packages, and define product parts as well, but in the video we keep it easy.

Next, we assign the product to a customer account. But not the product definition, of course.

One reason is, we need to track when the product was delivered to the customer, at which price, etc. So we record the product instances in a different table, but related with the product defined beforehand, which is shown in a drop-down selection list (a.k.a. combo box).

In this way, we can track which products have been sold to the customers in the past, when, at which price, etc.

Service level agreements require to control due dates for projects, case resolution, tasks, and the escalation to managers when the dates are not met.

In Holmes CRM, different types of workflow documents (such as Cases, Tasks, Projects) have a due date.

If the document is not closed by the due date, an escalation event is generated, which triggers an alert.

Alerts are sent by e-mail and displayed in the Console of the application, to a number of managers, associated with an escalation level.

We can define different levels of escalation, each level has a duration, afterwards, if the document is still open, a new escalation is triggered, of higher level.

In this way, we can notify first line managers, then go up in the hierarchy, as defined by the business requirements.

We can define more than one escalation matrix, each with different escalation levels and managers.

A "workflow" can be defined as "the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion".

In Holmes CRM, we have different types of workflow objects:

• Cases: used to manage customer requests or incidents, requests between teams, operations & maintenance work, etc. 
• Projects: In project management a project consists of a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. 
• Opportunities: used to track business opportunities by Sales teams.
• Quotes: commercial propositions
• Orders: purchase orders are formal requests of products and services, can be received from customers, or issued to suppliers.
• Tasks: tasks can be created standalone, or can be associated to other workflow objects such as cases or projects.

Cases are created to manage back-office work, requests between teams, maintenance activities, etc. 

Cases are workflow objects, as they are pieces of work that are initiated, dispatched to teams, and eventually closed.

In Holmes, the basic workflow operations are:

• Accept, from a queue to one's WIP bin
• Dispatch, from person work-in-progress (WIP) bin, to a queue (normally shared by many employees)
• Reject, out from the queue, back to the creator
• Forward, from one queue to a different queue
• Assign, directly to one person's WIP bin (only administrators)
• Yank, to grab from one person WIP bin (only administrators)

This video shows how to create, dispatch and close a case, and also shows the SLA feature for cases.

 A Service Level Agreements (SLA) is a contract between a service provider (either internal or external) and the end user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider. Normally SLA define deadlines for activities such as cases or projects. 

In Holmes CRM, deadlines can be set for workflow objects such as tasks, cases, projects, etc. 

Historically, dead lines where lines draw around a prison, beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot. In Holmes CRM, however, when missing deadlines, we just send an escalation notice by e-mail to the managers configured in a escalation matrix, and display an alert in the main panel of the Console, as explained here.