CRM in PHP

Modern business is characterized by multitasking: it needs to build trusting relationships with customers, monitor the work of employees, keep inventory records, interact with suppliers and build effective marketing strategies.

In such circumstances, companies are no longer enough with the capabilities of the usual excel tables, and they need deeper automation – with the help of individual CRM systems.

Unlike “boxed” solutions, individual CRMs are created for the needs of a particular business, so their functionality may differ in different companies. At the same time, there are several main tasks that such systems solve:

• Maintaining a customer base. CRM collects, stores, and organizes information about customers and the history of interaction with them. In practice, this simplifies communication with consumers and significantly improves the quality of service.
• Process automation. Automation is one of the main tasks of a modern CRM system. With its help, you will put on wheels most of the routine processes and free up staff time for more important tasks, such as attracting new customers.

• Marketing optimization. CRM helps you better understand your audience and provides real customer data. Accordingly, using this information, you will be able to build more effective marketing strategies.
• Control of work of personnel. Using CRM, the head of the company can monitor the productivity of each employee in real time, for example, how many applications he has processed since the beginning of the month, the amount of completed transactions, customer feedback on his work, and so on.
• Procurement management. Inventory management tools can be integrated into CRM, which allows you to monitor product balances, expiration dates and replenish stocks in a timely manner.

When developing CRM, it is important to provide for the possibility of its further development and compatibility with different operating systems. Therefore, the choice of technologies plays an extremely important role here. If we talk about PHP, then this is a reliable and time-tested programming language that powers almost 80% of all existing sites. In addition, PHP has Laravel and Yii2 functionalities, which significantly speed up development and provide more reliable system security.

It is also important that PHP is suitable for creating not only web versions of CRM, but also desktop applications on Windows, macOS and Linux, which are installed on a PC and are characterized by increased performance.

The main advantages of PHP include:

• open source;
• high development speed;
• flexibility and good compatibility;
• high performance;
• developed community of developers;
• a large number of open source libraries.

When creating CRM systems, we use the SCRUM methodology. Its idea is that the entire amount of work is distributed among the team members and is carried out in short sprints. This iterative approach allows for closer interaction with the customer and leaves room for new ideas.

In addition to the methodology, there are also development stages. Let’s take a closer look at the six main ones.

Stage 1. Gathering information

CRM development always starts with research. At this stage, specialists need to study the company’s business processes, sales and marketing cycles, as well as the client’s experience with similar solutions. To find answers to these and other questions, we organize meetings with customer representatives, at which we discuss everything in detail.

Stage 2. Design and creation of technical documentation

When all the necessary information is obtained, the developers begin to design the system and create a prototype. As a rule, it includes:

• interface page mockups;
• navigation system;
• functional description;
• project development plan.

After that, in order to agree on the CRM development vector, the prototype is presented to the customer and approved, and then a technology stack is selected for its implementation.

Stage 3. Design development

CRM covers almost all business processes of the company, so it is important that its interface remains convenient and understandable for users. The laconic design will greatly simplify the training of personnel, as well as minimize the likelihood that employees will make mistakes during work.

Most often, an individual design is created for CRM, which takes into account the features of its functionality and the corporate style of the company.

With this approach, all elements of the system are drawn from scratch and harmoniously interact with each other.

Stage 4. Programming

The technical development of CRM can be divided into two main components:

• Frontend. This is the client part of CRM with which users interact. It is created in strict accordance with the previously approved design using static HTML / CSS / JavaScript or reactive technologies – Vue.js / React.js.
• Backend. The backend is responsible for all the processes that take place on the server – the operation of the functionality, interaction with databases and processing user requests. When developing in PHP, a pure programming language or its frameworks – Laravel / Yii2 can be used.

Stage 5. Testing

At this stage, QA engineers check the correct operation of the implemented functionality and ensure that all CRM modules work as intended during design.

Stage 6. Technical support and development

The first time after the deployment of CRM, your employees may still encounter various unforeseen errors that were not detected before.

Such problems are promptly eliminated by developers as part of technical support.

In addition, you can continue to develop CRM even after the release – add new functionality to it, remove obsolete ones, change the visual design, and so on. Thus, the system can grow in parallel with your business and will always be up to date. To implement updates, additional patches are released, which are then tested and installed in an existing CRM.

A CRM system is, first of all, an automation tool. It will help build more trusting relationships with customers, increase the speed of order processing and optimize the work of staff, relieving them of a significant proportion of routine tasks. All this will create favorable conditions for the growth of your company and increase its competitiveness in the market.

For the development of CRM, we, at AVADA MEDIA, are not limited to PHP alone, and we select the optimal technology stack that can best solve the client’s business tasks. For example, these can be Python, C++, JavaScript (Node.js) or various frameworks. In addition, we are always open to dialogue, listen carefully to the client’s ideas, discuss them and make recommendations based on our own experience.