Today, interactions between an organization and its customers, clients, and vendors move at breakneck speed via many different mediums (e.g., e-mail, phone, fax) and occur at various touch points such as sales, customer service, and support. The events and processes that happen during customer interaction can have a major impact on creating customer loyalty. Organizing and tracking this flow of information in a way that helps you help your customers is what customer relationship management (CRM) is all about.

A successful CRM solution focuses on effectively organizing and sharing important information within an enterprise without disrupting the mission-critical business processes or changing the basic applications that users are accustomed to.

Strive for Simplicity

Enterprise Extensions for Lotus Notes from iEnterprises, Inc., is a function-rich, user-friendly CRM solution. This software lets your company use its existing Lotus Notes interface for all its collaborative activities and capture shared activities from applications that your employees use daily.

With Enterprise Extensions, designated users can share a Customer Contacts database, group calendar, customer activity logs, and knowledge bases (which store product information, discussion threads, and canned e-mail responses). The software also lets sales and service representatives share pertinent customer information and track phone calls, e-mails, appointments, and to-do lists as a group.

Enterprise Extensions seamlessly integrates with your existing Lotus Notes Mail and Calendar and Address Book databases to track contacts and to capture e-mail, calendar entries, and to-do lists directly from the Notes Mail database.

Installation and Setup

Installing Enterprise Extensions for Lotus Notes is straightforward; however, you must have the proper authority to create new replicas and databases on the server to install the product. (Check the Server document in the Domino Directory to see whether you have this ability, or contact your administrator.) You run the setup (which you can download from iEnterprises' Web site at http://www.ienterprises.com) from the Notes client. The nine Enterprise Extensions databases are automatically copied to the mail server specified on your Location document. These databases include

• IENPortal.NSF — Portal database
• IENAddresses.NSF — Contacts and Company database
• IENGroupCal.NSF — Shared Activities database
• IENOpportunity.NSF — Opportunity Management database
• IENChat.NSF — Disscussion database
• IENReference.NSF — Document Library database
• IENHelpDesk.NSF — Help Desk
• IENItems.NSF — Projects, Client Matters, Products, and Events database
• IENConfig.NSF — Configuration Settings database
  If the installer detects a local copy of your mail file, local replicas of the Enterprise Extensions databases are also created. This feature lets users employ the fully functional product if they're disconnected from the server. Although this feature is automatically configured during the installation process, you can also manually configure it by creating local replicas of the nine databases.
  Once the installation is complete, open the portal (IENPortal.NSF) in the Notes client to navigate the system via the tabbed interface at the top of each screen. You can configure these tabs for your entire company or for individual users. To configure your settings for the system, open the user guide (IENDoc.NSF) and follow the instructions under Administration\Installation and Setup. These instructions guide you through the required steps to get the product up and running. The user guide includes topics such as setting document-level security, specifying Access Control Lists (ACLs) for the databases, setting company defaults, and activating server-based agents.
  
  Using the System
  Once you've installed the product, you can start using the system. Like the Domino server it runs on, Enterprise Extensions is scalable. You can configure and set up its numerous user-defined fields to track the appropriate information for your organization's specific needs (Figure 1). To do so, simply type in the field name and value in the proper columns in the configuration screen. You'll find more than 250 user-defined fields available throughout the system.
  There are countless ways to set up the user-defined fields within your organization. For example, you could set up fields to track the company's Standard Industrial Classification, a contact's hobbies, a project's expected completion date, or a sales opportunity's client matter and market segment.
  Video tutorials in the user guide provide additional information. But if you want to dig in and start interacting with your contacts, simply open the Enterprise Extensions address book (IENAddresses.NSF). Note that your entire organization can share this address book, which is like a shared personal address book with security at the contact level (i.e., you control who can view and edit each contact based on department or level within your company).
  You can optionally copy the contents of your personal address book to the Enterprise Extensions address book during the installation process simply by answering yes when prompted. Or, you can manually add contacts by clicking View and selecting New Contact in the address book. On the resulting screen (Figure 2), enter at least a first and last name, a company name, and an e-mail address for each contact. If you've created any contact user-defined fields, you can enter that data by selecting the Details tab. (If you want to import data from your existing external systems, iEnterprises, Inc., offers a holding database that can act as a conduit for conversion. You can download this free of charge from the iEnterprises Web site at http://www.ienterprises.com/ie.nsf/download. The holding database supports all platforms that support the Notes client and Domino.)
  To send customers e-mails, quotes, letters, mass mailings, faxes, and more, click the Contacts tab, highlight a contact name, select Actions, and choose E-Mail Merge from the drop-down menu (Figure 3). Additionally, the product integrates with Microsoft Office to let you create a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet and link it to specific contacts in your shared address book. You can even send personalized mass e-mails to all your contacts that appear tailor-made for each recipient. To do this, highlight a contact from the shared address book, click Actions, and select E-Mail Merge. If you want to create a personalized Microsoft Word document for a specific contact, click Actions, and choose MS Word Document from the drop-down menu.
  The account file screen, available from any part of the system by selecting View and clicking Account File, displays a summary of account information. To reduce unnecessary information or to restrict sensitive or confidential data, you can set the security in the system to limit each user's access to only the information pertinent to him or her. For example, you can limit a salesperson's clients to only those contacts in his or her territory.
  With the Opportunity Management module (IENOpportunity.NSF), you can forecast sales. For example, you can create specific sales processes in the Configuration database to ensure that the appropriate methodology is used to relate to your customers and contacts.
  It's All About Relationship
  Whether you work for a sales organization or a professional services corporation, maintaining an excellent relationship with your vendors, partners, clients, and customers is key to success. Because all Enterprise Extensions databases are shared, your organization's members can keep abreast of relevant conversations, e-mails, and meetings with specific customers and take action on important matters at a moment's notice without the burden of back-and-forth phone calls and memos. Enterprise Extensions also provides a Q&A discussion group module so you can brainstorm or ask for advice from other team members.
  Enterprise Extensions is a user-friendly, fully functional CRM solution that may be just what you need to leverage your Domino infrastructure, enable cross-communication within your organization, and most important, increase customer satisfaction.

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