When you call your company SeeRM and the basis of the operation is to introduce digital relationship marketing to the good folk of Northern Ireland then I guess it's fairly important to have a working CRM system running our own business! The problem is, where to start – there's so many to choose from.

The CRM process is the bedrock of any modern-thinking business, recognising that being able to track and manage all aspects of the customers' interactions with an organisation is the key to long-term, loyal, happy and profitable relationships. Our view is that, really, all of the clever social media and website stuff is only ever a route into CRM marketing database – so there'd better be one!

I decided to think about it from the point of view of my own customers; what would they want? It needs to be low cost (if not free even), easy to use, fully functional and capable of allowing multiple administrative users. And so the hunt began...!

The 'low cost' thing then very quickly eliminated a number of the big players like Oracle and Microsoft. It also put paid to some of the cool online 'new kids' of CRM like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM because, while they're all brilliant and magnificent, by the time you add all of the available functionality and a few user licenses, it does get awfully expensive every month.

So, deciding on a nominal budget of £20 per user per month I found 3 CRMs to trial: Vtiger, Woosabi and Moobiz. These last two are typical of the new 'web2.0'-type online SAAS (software as a service offerings) increasingly being made popular by the likes of Basecamp or Mailchimp. Typical by the way includes having a funny name and a mad colour scheme, but don't let that put you off – it didn't hurt Google or Twitter...

And they're very good, no doubt about it – it's just that I didn't really like them. They felt 'lightweight' or restricted in some way, like the way you have to enter your account data or read it back. Or the way that you had to create an invoice and pretty much live with what came out. Anyway, I'm not going to dis these products because they were genuinely very good, just not for me.

So why was that? I think it's because I want a system that has more options then I can use so that it's my choice to turn some of them off. I want a system that allows me to decide what my account contacts look like and how they're listed and grouped. I want to be able to tweek the layout of my quotes, sales orders and invoices and then be able to track how they're dealt with. And, d'ya know, I just really wanted it for free because I'll bet my customers do too.

So I plumped in the end for a system called Vtiger CRM because, well, because it does all that stuff and allows me to run my business from one piece of incredible, functional browser-based software – and it is really free, honestly!

I build all of SeeRM's websites in an open source system called Joomla which allows me to pull together pretty much any sort of functionality you could think of, off the shelf. 'Open source' means that the software doesn't cost anything except for the cost of hosting the thing and I have a really good deal going for that with Belfast hosting company Unite Solutions.

So, because there's already some existing php-enabled web hosting going on it's really very simple to add the Vtiger CRM into the same place and integrate the website with the CRM via a form on the site.  Then you're connected and working and it really is astonishing what the small business can do with the right tools.

Conclusion

Is Vtiger perfect? No it's not. It has a few buggy things and when you go to the support forum for the first time you realise that this thing is the product of an awful lot of people all working together on a voluntary basis. But then I think that's kinda cool and I'm the sort of idiot that will happily stay up all night playing with software so that 'you don't have to', as the saying goes.

But it is free and does pretty much everything I wanted on my wishlist so I'm very happy to use it for now and to recommend it to my customers as a first system, if only to work out what a CRM does and is for and why having a marketing database is such a crucial element for your business. I can help set it up very easily and once you get there you'll never look back. And there are a zillion suppliers out there eager to supply you when you're ready to spend real money on it.

Now, worthy of mention there is another product called Worketc.com (see, silly name again) and that looks good at your £20 per month. Maybe I'll get through my workload soon to be able to have a look at that one and then I'll report back...