%0 Journal Article %J Open Source Business Resource %D 2010 %T Communication Enabled CRM %A Elias Majic %X Customer relationship management software is used to manage and enhance a company's interactions with its customers. Typically, CRM software integrates well with other communication software, such as email, but includes little or no integration with telephone or video conferencing systems. For companies that interact frequently with their customers or internal teams by telephone or video, this greatly limits the usefulness of their CRM system. Ideally, a CRM system offers flexibility to allow communication with customers in a variety of ways and provides consistent reporting and logging of these interactions regardless of which form of communication was used. This allows for greater insight from interactions with customers and helps better understand how to meet customer needs. This article describes our recent experiences as we set out to integrate communications services provided by Coral CEA into an open-source CRM system. CoralCEA is a platform that provides developers open application programming interfaces to easily integrate powerful communication features into web applications. In our case, we were interested in enabling telephone, telephone conferencing, and video conferencing services within a CRM application. However, the article is not just relevant to CRM users, since it illustrates how powerful communication services can be easily added to almost any existing web application. After reading this article, you will have a better understanding of the basics of CRM, how better communication improves the experience for both the company and the customer, and you will hopefully be encouraged to consider integrating powerful communication services into your own web applications. %B Open Source Business Resource %I Talent First Network %C Ottawa %8 05/2010 %G eng %U http://timreview.ca/article/352 %N May 2010 %9 Articles %1 Carleton University Elias Majic has a bachelor in software engineering at Carleton University. He worked for several years at software companies before pursuing a startup focused on web enabled speech recognition. He returned to graduate school to attend Carleton University's TIM program where he is currently enrolled. His thesis is focused on the adoption of speech recognition.