When your business core is creating relationship among high executives focusing on business generation, keeping control of this process is strategic for the organization. As a media company with different products – such as events, magazines and websites – our challenge at Live Healthcare Media is creating a database with crossed information from different technological platforms to understand our audience and sponsors individually, thousands of people with dozens of information about each one of them, with temporal and comparative relation.
The use of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to operate this is inevitable, We already used a robust software to reach this goal, but it gave us some limitations, specially because of:
- high costs of licenses and certified consultancy;
- complexity to extract and maintain the data;
- long learning curve for managers.
After evaluating what is available in the market, a CRM that was far from the mainstream used in Brazil started to fulfill our requirements. EspoCRM, an Ukrainian open-source and web-based software, was the chosen one.
Even going against the tendencies and migrating from a software as a service to a managed software, the operational costs of the IT department and the facilities of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service became attractive and viable, since the budget with licenses was totally neutralized.
With EspoCRM, we found a liable software used for 20 thousand companies in 161 countries, with frequent updates, friendly and easy-to-use interface, well documented API, besides long personalization possibilities.
The current development stage is the data homologation and all the procedures are satisfying our expectations and creating high liability. The next steps include challenges of integration between services that would not be possible with our old software.
Filipe Boldo, IT Manager at Live Healthcare Media