Customer conversations next to customer money
Buying a billing system and a CRM separately means two customer records, two licence fees and an integration project to keep them agreeing with each other. OpenBRM ships with an open source billing CRM, so the quote, the ticket and the invoice refer to the same account. It is a quotes and tickets billing system in one product, not two systems and an integration.
Quotes and tickets in the billing system
- Quotes — priced from the same product catalogue that will bill the order
- Support tickets raised against a customer account and its subscriptions
- Bulk SMS and email notification to segments of your customer base
- Automatic reminders — renewals, anniversaries, prepaid refill prompts
- Configurable notification templates tied to billing events
Billing notifications that send themselves
The most useful customer messages are the ones the billing system already knows to send: invoice issued, payment failed, plan about to renew, prepaid balance running low, collections step reached. Because notifications are configured alongside the billing and collections processes, these fire from the event itself rather than from a scheduled job guessing at state.
When you already have a telecom CRM
Plenty of operators run Salesforce, vTiger, SugarCRM or SuiteCRM and are not replacing it. OpenBRM integrates with vTiger, SugarCRM and SuiteCRM directly, and exposes its data over SOAP and REST for anything else. The built-in CRM is there so that smaller providers do not have to buy a second system on day one — not to force a migration on those who have one.
Notifications you can configure
Customer notifications are grouped into four categories. Invoice notifications remind customers that an invoice has been sent, from the moment it is generated until it is paid or falls due. Order notifications warn that a purchase order is about to expire. Payment notifications confirm a successful payment or report a failed one. User notifications cover overdue payments, suspended accounts, password resets and requests for updated card details. Email content comes from editable templates, so the wording and branding of each message can change without a release.
Collections that follow up for you
When an invoice goes unpaid, the collections process works through steps you define. The example in the documentation gives a five-day grace period, retries the payment, sends a warning, retries twice more and suspends the account after 30 days if nothing has been paid. Each step can send a notification, retry the payment or change the account status, and the history sits on the customer record next to the quotes and tickets.
Your own customer fields
Meta fields add the customer data your business needs, such as a contract reference or an account manager, without changing the database by hand. Meta fields can also be added to products, orders, invoices and payments, so the details a support agent needs are on the records they already open. Tickets raised against an account stay with that account, which gives anyone picking up a case the full history of quotes, invoices, payments and earlier conversations.
CRM and gateway integrations · Notification configuration · Collections process
The CRM is part of OpenBRM's open source BSS — one reason it is a lighter alternative to Oracle BRM, where CRM is usually a separate product.