Geocoding is the process of converting an address to a lat/long set of coordinates for mapping against the google maps api (or the other way around ie: coords to address).  This used to be quite a long winded job exploding arrays and all kinds of jazz in the older Google Maps API’s however as of V3 its become incrediably simple when using PHP to quickly request and retrieve the coordinates from an input address.

I’m not going to go into massive details explaining it as its mostly commented in the code you can also find more information direct from google on their maps API page including a full list of status codes and a complete breakdown of the returned XML feed. http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/

For our request we’ll be using the PHP built in function simplexml_load_file().

$postcode = urlencode("DN4 6HP"); // post code to look up in this case status however can easily be retrieved from a database or a form post
    $request_url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=".$postcode."&sensor=true"; // the request URL you'll send to google to get back your XML feed
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($request_url) or die("url not loading");// XML request
    $status = $xml->status;// GET the request status as google's api can return several responses
    if ($status=="OK") {
        //request returned completed time to get lat / lang for storage
        $lat = $xml->result->geometry->location->lat;
        $long = $xml->result->geometry->location->lng;
        echo "$lat,$long";  //spit out results or you can store them in a DB if you wish
    }
    if ($status=="ZERO_RESULTS") {
        //indicates that the geocode was successful but returned no results. This may occur if the geocode was passed a non-existent address or a latlng in a remote location.
    }
    if ($status=="OVER_QUERY_LIMIT") {
        //indicates that you are over your quota of geocode requests against the google api
    }
    if ($status=="REQUEST_DENIED") {
        //indicates that your request was denied, generally because of lack of a sensor parameter.
    }
    if ($status=="INVALID_REQUEST") {
        //generally indicates that the query (address or latlng) is missing.
    }

Thats it as simple as that I’ve put in the traps for the different status returns from google however not done anything with them apart from comment them its upto you how you make your application fallback.

Today FC Software released FC CRM Lite!

Free CRM For your business!
FC CRM Lite! is a completely FREE version of our FC CRM product.  There are no strings attached and no tie ins or contracts.  You simply goto our FREE CRM page and sign up.  Within an hour you will receive an email providing you all the details you need to log into your FREE CRM and begin working.

As usual with FC Software there are no limits on what you can do with the product features, no limits on contacts, no limits on notes, no limits on events or meetings etc. FC CRM Lite! is available 24/7 for your business and users.

However we have implemented a few global limitation.  There is a max limit of 2 users on our FC CRM Lite! product and we have disabled the email campaign and landing page campaign module and all emailing and email template facilities are disabled.

If you should wish to unlock those features and increase your user count at the same time you can do this at any time by simply emailing our sales team, they will discuss your needs with you and move you either onto the FC CRM Standard or FC CRM Professional versions.

Why you may ask are we giving away a completely FREE CRM?

Well its a good question and mostly comes down to our general attitude to business.  We know how hard it is to setup your own business, we know that without good tools you spend more time doing tedius tasks than and legwork than actually working to build your business.  Many new startups and 1 (wo)man bands can benefit massively from having a good CRM system behind them but many also can’t budget or aford even one as cheap as FC CRM.

To this end we decided that if they can’t aford it we should just give it to them for free!  Crazy concept we know but there you have it now you can get a fully fledged and functioning CRM for your business all for the cost of nothing.  As and when your business is ready to grow we are ready to grow the product with you and customise it to your needs but until then.  Enjoy our FREE CRM

 

 

OK so we’re long overdue a new blog.

This time I thought we’d go a little bit different to the usual type of blog posts you get from CRM Solutions Vendors. So I came up with this “little” blog entry.  I hope to give you some insight into how we as a company went from a concept to having a very powerful CRM solution available to our clients.  I’ll cover everything from the initial concept and what lead us to developer our own CRM solution from scratch all the way through to the future and how we intend to grow our CRM offering.

 

In the beginning

Back in 2006 myself (Dave) and Lester were working for another CRM company acting as a resale partner for a large American CRM Vendor.

Over the course of 2 years there were a few common themes that came out of almost all our conversations with clients and leads.

• The system is too complex – lots of features 80% of them unneeded.
• Counter intuitive interface – having to go down a rabbit warren of links/folders to find the information you require
• Not fit for UK business – being American the product was squarely aimed at the American way of selling/sales which doesn’t match or suit UK business sale processes or methodologies.
• While feature rich it was missing a few core features that every CRM should have (you had to pay extra to receive these features!)
• High Cost of ownership.

There were a few more internal issues we as a company were facing while dealing with an American vendor.

• Poor partner support for sales / lead generation – all leads generated via the primary vendor website went to American companies.
• Poor partner technical support – the vendor had NO UK time zone technical support which often meant us working well outside of hours to speak to technical support
• No interest in simplifying the product / tailoring it to the UK market needs.

So one day we decided we could do better ourselves.  Our first point of call was checking out all the UK produced CRM systems the initial idea being we would partner with those instead of an American company.  However it rapidly became apparent that those solutions were either simply inadequate or copies of American solutions again and therefore not suitable.

Being a developer myself I blurted out something along the lines of “I could write a CRM” and so our process beings.

We started contacting existing clients and building up a list of their “must have” and “nice to have” features.  We developed pages of their issues and problems.  We analysed their work flows and processes helping us to build up a picture of exactly how UK based businesses operate and function.

Now we knew what we had to make it was time to build it.

 

The Technology (Why we did it like this)

Now came the process part of how do you write a CRM.  We knew where we had to get to we just had to get there.

For the technology we were noticing 2 things. One, Customers didn’t want the expense of an in house hosted server both setup costs and maintenance costs. Two, hosted/cloud based applications were finally starting to build up weight with business and providing a valid business option.

We chose the web based cloud solution.  Going this way allows us to maintain performance across all our CRM solutions at once and allows us to grow and maintain the hardware cluster beneath our cloud so we always provide the best service possible without having to arrange visits to client sites or having clients foot the bill for server upgrades etc.

So now we know which route we were going it was time to choose technologies/languages to be used.  We chose to go PHP for the underlying coding engine, Linux (of the Debian flavour) for the server OS’s and MySQL for our database technology.  Many people ask why we chose the open source route.  Well its a valid question I guess.

Linux – Tried tested and highly optimizable. Not to mention using an opensource web server that we could strip out and optimise for high performance by removing unneeded features. Creating a high performance delivery platform.

PHP – A little bit more of a personal choice here we could have used various other languages, ruby, python etc.  First up personal choice, I’d been primarily using PHP for a couple of years since that’s the language our American CRM was written in, secondly PHP is a tried and tested platform and has lots of options for optimising from opcode through to custom module support.  While many people argue PHP isn’t an enterprise class language  this is 100% false and based pretty much of favouritism for their personal language of choice.  Sure PHP isn’t without its fault I can list many but it works just fine in high load – high availability – high speed enterprise class applications. The most obvious of which I point you towards is Facebook!

MySQL – Again tried and tested in an enterprise class environment, highly scalable and easy to work with.  Also very fast!

So thats the underlying technology  – at least the important bits there’s other fancy stuff in there too.  Now onto…..

 

The Development and Results

Having written many enterprise class systems and solutions before I felt fairly confident I could deliver a CRM solution in about 6 months!  After all how complex can it be right?

…..wrong.

It took me 3 years in total and 22 different revisions of the system to get to where we are today.  We worked closely with clients and contacts to refine the system layer upon layer and nail down the whole work flow and process of data through the system.  We provided it free of charge to “beta” clients who helped us refine it further under real world usage.

I’m fairly sure no other CRM vendor has done as much client focus and requirement as we’ve done. Our entire product is based on exactly what you as the client asked for.

Its simple to use. So simple in fact it requires zero training.  Its fast. Very Very fast! both in data retrieval (faster than any other CRM by an order of magnitude) and in usage.  Any action within the system can be done in seconds including adding leads/contacts etc.

We built a modular core which means that the core product can be customised to client specific needs be that integration with other products or custom data fields or completely brand new modules.  One of our clients are City based stock market traders.  Our system tracks ALL their trades in real time and calculates company accounts + payroll from the data stored within.  Others have gone for a more traditional expenses module or quotation/invoicing module. Because its modular we can do anything we like quickly and easily.  It makes customisation for our clients fast to live and also very cost effective compared to the equivalent costs with other vendors.

We have a CRM Solution that is that matches perfectly to the needs of UK based businesses.

Its web based its available 24/7 from anywhere in the world on any device! (the UI adapts to the browsing device). No longer do you as a company need to open up firewalls and risk the security of your corporate network by having internally hosted servers which you also have to support!

We also managed to cram alot of features in the system that other vendors do not have as standard and instead charge extra for. We have document management and storage with unlimited storage space (some charge for storage space!). We have a fully featured and very powerful campaign manager I’ve blogged about previously. Allowing you to do all the email marketing and tracking + reporting you could ever wish for.  It also happens to support landing page campaigns and tracking and also postal campaigns with advanced label printing. No more having to mess around with mail merges and excel/word.

There’s also hundreds of little tweaks here and there through out our system again unique to us but they save our clients so much time and effort and importantly money.

Now if I sound like a sale pitch/gushing there I’m sorry I am a developer honest. I’m just very pleased with the product we now have to market and knowing how far its come from where it was to where it is now has made all the effort, long days, no holidays etc all worth it.  All our clients love the product and the support both on product and for their business they receive from us.  So much so I’m again very proud to be able to state we’ve never lost a client! Yep you read that right once people sign up with us they’ve never had cause to leave even when approached and pitched hard by other CRM vendors offering insane discounts for them to switch.

Even more impressive is we’re one of the most cost effective CRM’s on the market providing the fastest ROI.

OK so to avoid me rambling for much longer I’m going to end here.  If you want to know/find out more you’re always welcome to either email me or simply comment on this post.

If you want to see what I’ve been going on about in action you can take the FC CRM Demo.

If you’d like a walk through by myself Request A Demo

If you’d like to take our free trial with your data (We do this because an empty CRM is a useless CRM so we’ll import your data for you to play with it all free!)

Or if you want you can even just call us for a chat about your business and ask us about the challenges we faced as a start up, how we managed it etc.  No Sales, No pushy just Director to Director chat about the issues of running and starting your own company.

If you are so inclined you can also contact me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-hinchliffe/2/b3/146 I’m happy to talk to you about anything relating to your business and provide help and insight all for free !

It’s that time of year again – snow is falling, there’s ice on the ground and staff are failing to turn up to work!

Wouldn’t it be nice if your sales teams could continue to work from home (or anywhere else they may be stranded)?

If the answer is yes then this email is for you. First Contact CRM can offer you a simple and affordable product that will keep your company operating at peak efficiency regardless of the weather or time of year?

So what is FC CRM?

FC CRM is the next generation of Contact Management software. Our revolutionary product, which is simple to use and extremely affordable, has been designed to meet the everyday needs of the small to medium sized company. Find out more…

Will it work for my company?

Try out are winter offer – a free trial with your own data!!!

Why Your Company needs FC CRM?

Choosing a CRM system that best suits your company is vital to your future success. An effective CRM system will transform the efficiency of your business – and now you don’t have to break the bank to get one

Features include:

• Organise and manage your leads, prospects, targets, clients and general contacts all in one place at the click of a button.
• All your company contacts in one place.
• Document storage – no other CRM in this class provides advanced document storage facilities as found in FC CRM
• Marketing Campaign Management – manage postal mail shots, web based landing pages and email marketing campaigns with our built in campaign manager.
• Store notes and other details against both companies and individuals
• Automated emails and preset templates including attachments. Send out a brochure or follow up email at the click of a button!

Contact us today

Call Lester on 01368 830630 or email sales@fcsoftware.co.uk
If you so wish we can even be reached on Skype by calling lester.fennell

Wow it’s been a busy month here at FC Software we’ve been hard at work finishing and testing our new campaign management module for the FC CRM system.

What is Campaign Management?

Here at FC Software we took a rather open view on campaigns.  We define campaigns as any method of direct target marketing to prospects, leads, contacts and existing clients.

During our design process we decided there were 3 main methods companies connect with their contacts.  Postal, Email and Landing Pages.  This means we really focused on these 3 area’s of direct target marketing when developing our campaign module and in turn this has lead our Campaign Management development.

What does the FC CRM – Campaign Management Module Do?

It allows users of the FC CRM system to prepare marketing campaigns for either Postal, Email or Landing pages. Target these campaigns directly at contacts, prospects, leads and clients stored within the FC CRM system and gather detailed metrics on those campaigns.  At the same time it simplifies the whole campaign creation, sending and management process so sending out that latest Email Campaign or Newsletter becomes a 5 minute job not the several hours other systems make it!

Postal Campaigns

Create your campaign, Add your campaign targets to the mailing list.  Then using our cutting edge label printer generate a template for all the common Avery Label sizes for your contacts.  Fill your printer with the matching labels and click the print button.  Easy as that.  Using the FC CRM Campaign system you can prepare your entire postal campaign in under 5 minutes.

Landing Pages

Create a landing page campaign,  Create the links required for your landing page HTML.  The advanced link generator of the FC CRM Campaign system will automatically turn your campaign links into HTML and all you have to do is copy and paste them into your template.  Wrap them around images or create text links.

Once your campaign is active and your landing page is up the FC CRM Campaign system will immediately begin tracking link clicks in real time.  Our advanced reporting facilities allow you to gain both high level and drill down details on the links clicks and total clicks accurate to the second of activity!  All in real time!

Email Campaigns

Email campaigns within the FC CRM Campaign system are a work of art.  Create your campaign, Add your targets, Create your links.  Our link engine will create link templates that can be used within our Email template system.  You can either design your email using our advanced built in template editor or supply the tracking link templates to your designer and let them do the hard work!

Prepare your campaign, Create your target list and have your campaign ready for sending within 5 minutes!  No other email marketing system is this easy or quick to use.

Once your campaign is sent the real magic begins.  We track email views and link clicks across targets, days and amounts all in real time.  Our advanced reporting facilities allow you to view the results as they happen and allow detailed drill down from general email views and link clicks to a detailed report of who clicked which link and when accurate to the second.  Or should you choose you can focus on a specific target and view their activities within the campaign.

Coupled with the landing page system and tracking the FC CRM Campaign Management system allows you to track and manage your marketing campaigns with an accuracy and detail never before available to companies.

Where’s the catch?

Well there isn’t one.  All this functionality and much much more is STANDARD with the core FC CRM package.  There are no limits to how many campaigns you can create and there are no limits to how many emails you can send per day.  Other systems out there even pure email marketing systems may place limits or expect you to pay per email sent we do not!

The only costs are the standard monthly fee’s for the FC CRM product.

Why not give our demo system a try now and then afterwards give us a call on 01368 830630 we are confident FC CRM is the right product for your business and will pave the way for you to increase your efficiency and maximise your profit.

We are so confident in the quality of the FC CRM system that we back it up with our personal guarantee.

You will not pay a penny until you are 100% satisfied with your CRM solution from FC Software

Web based CRM is what most businesses are going in for these days. It is not as expensive as setting up a different department to handle customer relations. It is fast to set up needing very few resources to run efficiently. It has proven to be invaluable to business owners and now it s set to make its way into the corporate ethos as a necessity rather than a luxury. It is good for a business in a number of ways as illustrated below.

Personal Commitment

CRM software allows the company to project a feeling of personal commitment to the customer. For instance, if you have a business where you sell some small electronic gadget you can use the software to generate a number of reminders which give your customer a wonderful experience after buying from your company. The reminders can be fed in for follow up of sales to check if they have any problems using the gadget, for servicing reminders to ensure that the gadget is kept in optimal functioning order and a whole lot more.

Competitive Advantage

Business contact management software gives the business owner a competitive advantage in a number of small ways. Since there are a number of tasks that the person is trying to do at the same time there is a good chance that handling customer care relations is not exactly top of the priority list for a business owner. And yet it is CRM which can make a vital difference for the small business. With the CRM software in place the business owner does not have to organize his contact with customers on his own, the software does it for him and reminds him to follow up.

Growth of the Business

Customer Relationship Management can make a world of a difference to the growth rate of a company. With the help of the CRM software any small business owner can give his customer base a world class customer care experience. And since most customers are loyal to companies which give them good value for money and fantastic customer care they will not only stay with the company but provide excellent word of mouth publicity. This is what helps the business accelerate its rate of growth.

Use the Latest Technology

By using the cutting edge technology you as a business owner help to benefit the company in some ways. You can develop email campaigns in advance to set customer care and parallel sales prospecting projects. You do not have to call the customer to ask if they are happy with the purchase they made from the company, you can mail them instead. The few who reply can then be sent out another set of mails after a period of time to ask if they would be interested in purchasing some other product which may be complementary to the one that they have already bought.

This can bring in sales on an automated system for the company. All this can be done without a single executive of the company spending any time on it. Well worth considering getting a CRM software for your company.

A CMMS system and web contact management software can help a business manage its customer and other data well. A sales contact management software will help convert leads and increase repeat sales.

We have started rolling out the document manager and storage system to existing clients and it will be included in all new installations of the B2B CRM solution.

If you have not yet been enabled with the document management facilities please contact support and they will be able to check your place in the roll out queue for you.

The document management has also been rolled out onto our B2B demo system so you can have a play with it before it hits your install (or you make the decision to switch to FC CRM). You can access the demo at http://b2b.fcsoftware.co.uk

This is just a very quick blog entry to provide a little snippet of code and hopefully help some people.

I offer coding help and advice on several PHP forms for beginners to the language.  One of the common problems they have seems to be date/time stamps and MySQL format and handling.  This seems to be especially relevant to UK coders where our dates take the format dd-mm-yyyy whereas MySQL stores the date in yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm:ss.

PHP is a wonderful language that makes working with dates etc actually very easy.  To resolve the format of date/times from MySQL to a more UK centric format I created a very simple function

function mysql2uk($date) {
      return date('d-m-Y H:i:s',strtotime($date));
} 

This brilliant little function in effectively a single line converts your mysql format date into a UK format date without you needing to wrap that entire line of code around every date you spit out.

So to use it your php page would simply be something like this

<?php

function mysql2uk($date) {
 return date('d-m-Y H:i:s',strtotime($date));
} 

$sql ="select * from table";

$result = mysql_query($sql) or die();

$values = mysql_fetch_row($result);

echo mysql2uk($values['column']);

?>

And as easy as that your date is now in a UK format.

You can edit the format by changing the 'd-m-Y H:i:s" part of the function and to save you having to have the function at the top of everyone of your pages you can put it in an include file and just include that file on your site/pages where you want the function available.

Hope this little snippet helps some.

Its been a while coming but its finally here .

You can now take a live demo of our B2B CRM system by visiting http://b2b.fcsoftware.co.uk

There are a few things you need to know first though.

• Login details are on the login page for both admin and standard users.
• Email functionality is disabled in the demo.
• User and group editing/adding/deleting is disabled in the demo.
• Document management facilities are disabled in the demo.
• Be aware other users will be able to see any information you put in we highly discourage using real names, email addresses, phone numbers.

This is the B2B product so remember its tailored for businesses selling to other businesses if you target consumers this product isn’t for you but we will have our telesales/B2C product ready soon.

In all cases for the demo it is running the entry or base level package without any additional extras or fancy stuff.

First up considering its a beta damn its stable.

I’ve not been able to find any problems with it yet even attempting to break it.  If it wasn’t for the invite only status I’d have thought this was a full blown 1.0 release.

There are however a few short comings in the client little things that could be improved or features added that aren’t currently added.

Firstly the buttons along the top its navigation effectively is lovely IF you’re using a BB with some kind of scroll wheel on the storm/storm2 they’re horribly small and if – like me – you have large fingers almost impossible to press accurately.

My suggestion for fixing this is left right motion switching.  Just like in BBM running your finger left or right across the screen cycles through the various chats. Can we not have the same for the twitter client?

Last I heard twitter were adding in Location support for tweets and users (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/08/location-location-location.html).  Now I don’t know if this came to pass but if it did then its certainly not supported by the BB client.

I don’t really have a solution to this however Ubertwitter resolves it in an interesting way.  They update the Location field with coordinates and then if you want to look at all users within say a 5 mile radius of yourself then you can do.  Its an interesting feature I’d like to see implemented – especially amusing on drunken nights out to find others making a fool of themselves – perhaps it could also be expanded to define some kind of BB user flag in there so you can perhaps say “show me all BB users within 5miles of me” leading perhaps to impromptu meets of fellow geeks/nerds and many gallons of ale….. Just a thought.

Multiple acount support is none-existant.

I have 2 accounts one for work and one for personal usage I’d like to be able to update them both while I’m out and about without having to log out log in and resync to each account manually.  Perhaps register multiple accounts and have a simple overview screen showing account name, number of new tweets, date of last tweet, number of @’s or DM’s.

Then simply clicking on that accounts icon takes you into what is currently the main page of the app.

Aside from those few things though RIM have done a superb job of the client and I think once its in final release I’ll be switching to using it full time instead of UT.