CRM for a call-center, with strong integration - build or buy?

Question

We have a custom CRM solution that among several things handles our call-center. That is, each call-center operator gets a queue of people (potential customers) to call based on a number of configurable rules. For example, certain operators only handle certain types of users. Call queues are ordered by call-time taking timezones into account.

EDIT: Operators dial manually. We're currently not interested in automating this.

Now we want to replace this call-center subsystem because it has several bugs, its implementation is very messy and the original developers left years ago.

So we're trying to decide whether to build this ourselves from scratch or integrate another CRM (like SugarCRM) for this specific task only.

But I'm totally ignorant about SugarCRM. Does it provide such a module? Is the SugarCRM API flexible enough to handle different rules to select and order a call queue? We're a .NET shop so we don't want to mess with SugarCRM's code. Or is there any other similar CRM you can recommend for this task? Where do I start?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I have built CRM systems that integrate with a PBX based dialing system. We had a lot of success with home grown systems.

I would advocate a build from my personal experience for the CRM portion.

What you are asking about, however, is the Dialing side of the system. This can be built as well - the API's for the Dialogic cards lend themselves nicely to .Net implementations. Now that is going to take some work, and most cheap dialers have some decent functionality out of the box to do what we want it to do.

It is when you get to complex functionality that they give up the ghost and by that time you are already so far tied into them that going into a new system is not feasible. I have seen this happen over and over again too.

If you have decent talent on hand, I would advocate writing the dialing system as well if you see yourself having to handle issues more intricate than your basic off-the-shelf dialer can handle.

Answer 2

If you are a .NET shop, is there a reason you've not mentioned MS Dynamics CRM ?

While there is a cost associated with it, there is a huge amount of customisation you can do, and if, at some point, you decide to look at telephony, it'd be straightforward to do that too.

Cheers

Nick