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Thread tagged as: Forms, Members

Anyone integrated perch with a CRM?

If anyone has successfully integrated perch with a CRM I'd very much appreciate any advice, ie. which one, how was it achieved and what pitfalls were incountered.

Nick Loat

Nick Loat 0 points

  • 4 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

CRM is a pretty broad term. Can you describe your use case a bit, including what sort of integration you're looking for?

Hi Drew, sorry for the delay in responding.

I have a client whose website is currently built with perch and who'd like now to add ecommerce capability. The problem I'm encountering is that their trade customers require a high level of service. Which requires the sales team to be able to register and manage their profiles and take orders for them via the backend of the website. A CRM capability is essential to track the order history of each customer, their current level of discount, contact details plus attach notes to their profiles of recent phone calls/emails/and actions required.

Initially I thought that this was all going to be possible through perch, but ran inot a couple of snags re: trade account registration (I need the ability to do this via the front and backend with the profile data held being editable either by the customer or the sales team, only simple form elements appear to allow this, as checkboxes, radio buttons and dropdowns don't appear to keep their selections - when seen from the opossit side.) Tags also seemed like they'd be a part of the possible solution, but are slightly problematic in that you can't create a predefined set (in the way you can with categories), its unclear as to whether they are case sensitive or can contain special characters such '%' - on creation it appears not but in the 'By Tag' dropdown menu Capital and special charaters do appear. Once created they can't be deleted so any that are nolonger required still appear in the 'By Tag' menu (although I think unused ones may be cleared up after a set period of time?).

All of the above I think are problably work-aroundable, however the biggest hurdle I've hit so far, is that the 'members' aren't searchable. Currently the client has just shy of 1,000 trade accounts and would need to pull up the profile of any given client a quickly as possible if say the client were to phone and be able to see vital information such as sales history and any notes previously attached to the profile.

The above is what's got me to the point where I probably need to think about some integration with a CRM. I'd seen a couple of posts on the forum which mentioned Zoho and Salesforce and was wondering if anyone had successfully integrated perch with either of these or any others for that matter.

Regards - Nick

On an aside, is the data for sales transactions held in a format that can be exported to Sage?

I haven't but am thinking along the same lines. My solution would be member login to a secure page via the perch CMS and Api the Sage or any other API capable CRM with the content to that space. You'd need to add a custom field to the members app that drives the custom content.