Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Leadscraper - An automated secretary

Today I'll continue with more vTiger customizations. One of our popular customizations is the Leadscraper.

The Leadscraper automates your email processing. Say you have a form on your website for customers to fill out support requests.

You might have somebody check the account for support requests, and when an email comes in they create a trouble ticket, associate it with the appropriate contact, and assign the trouble ticket to one of your support employees to resolve.

If you get more than a handful of support requests, that's a lot of work.

The Leadscraper can automate this step for your support staff, because the process described above is exactly what the Leadscraper does.

I should say, it is just one example of what the Leadscraper does.

You might also have a form for quote requests. The Leadscraper would match try to match the sender to your vTiger database, and if it's not there, it'll automatically create a new contact using the form data, and assign the quote request to sales.

The above examples both use forms, because the Leadscraper likes regular data; it can automate based on any number of form templates. You can also setup the Leadscraper to respond to regular email, but your range of automation will be limited.

Post a comment or visit Boru's vTiger Customization page for more info about what Leadscraper can do.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Google Maps in vTiger

We recently embedded Google Maps for a client and it turned out to be quite a nice customization. Of course, this allows you to immediately find the location of a contact, but even better is that you can also find the location of other contacts nearby. This makes it easy for your sales reps to get from place to place without driving back and forth across town.

First, select a contact and click the Map button:

Then, a map will display with all nearby contacts listed on the left. In this screenshot, I've filtered out everything but qualified leads:
With this client, we set the default map radius to 1 mile. . The queries would take forever if we set the radius any larger, because they have so many contacts. All in all, a good example of the incredibly powerful things you can do with vTiger. Click here for more details about Boru's vTiger customization.