CRM to pair with VICIdial?

[edooze]

Hi All,

I have a (probably) opinion-based question for you.

I am trying to somewhat plan the infrastructure for my business, and I would like the decision to be appropriate for the next (at least) five years or so.

I need VICIdial to integrate with my CRM. The problem I have is that I don't know which CRM to choose.

I imagine the easiest would be a locally installed, mySQL-backed solution, as this would naturally integrate with VICI, right? As in, the both share the same database server, and can have access to the same tables etc...

What I need to be able to do is modify, add/remove and work with leads on both an individual and batch basis. The agents need to be able to update and change information in these leads, and then when the lead is called in VICI it has this information in it. Also, the calls, notes and statuses of the lead need to be visible and changeable in the CRM.

In this manner, one could pull up all records with a certain call status in a particular list in the CRM, and look at each one etc etc. Please let me know if I need to shed more light on what I'm looking to do.

I have looked at vTiger. In fact, I currently have installed 5.4 - I just don't like being left that far behind in terms of updates. SugarCRM community edition is being discontinued, by the looks, do I don't really want to go there. I am considering SuiteCRM (as a fork of the last two), however am wondering whether VICI could be make to work with a hosted solution (vTiger or Sugar or even, say, Salesforce) without too much hassle?

I'm only a small business, but want to be sure that I don't pick something that suits now at the expense of being portable, expandable and usable in future. I have used systems at a number of places that was holding up the rest of the business, or that wouldn't work with something else and either took a lot of man-hours to work around on a day-to-day basis, or an expensive migration to get it to work with a new solution.

Eventually it would be good to be able to create lists in the CRM and have them available in VICI to add to a campaign when it comes time.

Any suggestions by more experienced people than me appreciated. I have an intermediate skill level in IT, but am happy to contract others where necessary.
Thanks.

[mflorell]

The ways you have described using a CRM are what you can already do within Vicidial itself. With Custom List Fields you can add whatever data you like to records, and you have the ability to edit them all in either the Admin or Agent screens.

Do you know how many records you are planning on having in your CRM?

Are there any other ways you are planning on using the CRM that you have not already listed?

As for Vtiger, we stopped developing for it after all 3 of companies paying for the development and maintenance of the Vicidial/Vtiger integration stopped using Vtiger. One developed their own home-grown CRM and the other two switched to Vicidial Custom Fields. The issues with Vtiger(and many other CRMs) is that they took shortcuts in how data is managed to make it easy to program, but this also made their data storage not very fast or efficient. This leads to huge issues when the data set grows beyond a half-million records.

Integration with Vicidial can be very easy if it is basic, but if you are looking for a tightly integrated situation, it will be very time-consuming to keep it working as you upgrade your CRM.

My suggestion is usually to just try using Vicidial by itself, and if you need other features integrated outside of Vicidial, just try to keep them simple so it is easier to maintain.

[edooze]

Alright, so it's been a while, but this (ongoing) project has taken a leap forward in recent months. We decided to go with SuiteCRM in the end, and a separate solution for our vici database.

I have a few questions on how Vici works:

Can we create lists in the SQL back-end (via script or manual entry) and have them display in the front-end, and be usable for campaigns etc?

If we want to create a table with call information, how many tables will we have to grab information from? (Looking to establish date, time, user, dispo, notes in the first instance)

Is the table for the list the only one that gets updated when a lead is modified? Does vici split information behind-the-scenes at all?

I have tried to map this all out with MySQL workbench, but have thus far been unsuccessful.

Thanks in advance.