Installing Vtiger takes two days. Understanding the customer takes six weeks — and sometimes longer. I learned this at the start of 2004, working with an automotive spare parts wholesaler in Adana, a firm with 42 employees. The owner told me plainly: ‘I want the program, but I do not want to lose my customers.’ That sentence changed everything about how I approached the project. This was not a software installation job. It was a customer process design job. When people talk about localization, they usually think of Turkish menus and date formats. Those things matter, but they are the easy part. The hard part is translating the way a sales team talks to customers — the unwritten rules, the habits, the shortcuts — into a structure that a program can hold. Every CRM (customer relationship management) project that skips this step ends up in the same place: the program is open, nobody uses it. I know because I arrived at that place once, before Adana.Vtiger CRM and SugarCRM were both released in 2004. Both were free to download and install — no license fee. In Turkey at the time, licensed CRM software was genuinely expensive for small and mid-sized firms. These two programs arrived at exactly the right moment: businesses that wanted to move beyond notebooks and index cards but could not afford a commercial system suddenly had a real option. The core promise was straightforward — customer records, sales opportunity tracking, quote management, and contact history, all visible in one place. Instead of a paper calendar, a computer screen. Instead of the receptionist’s personal notebook, a shared database. It sounds simple. But when I walked into that firm in Adana, I saw five notebooks on the desk, one fax machine, and two telephones. Those tools were not just old habits. They were working systems. The new program had to understand them before it could replace them.In the spare parts trade, a customer relationship means something specific. Most of this firm’s customers were small repair shops scattered across Adana’s neighbourhoods. A customer might call by phone, or send an apprentice over on foot. An order often sounded like: ‘Give me two more of those parts I bought last time.’ No customer number, no product code — just a voice and a context that the sales staff understood because they had been building that relationship for years. Now we had to put all of this into the program. What should go in the ‘customer name’ field? The company name, the owner’s name, or the nickname that everyone in the neighbourhood knew? That question was not technical. But without an answer, the program did not work. I am describing a representative scenario here rather than a documented case study: in a firm like this one, around 47 per cent of customer cards opened after the Turkish interface was installed contained incomplete or inconsistent information. Not because the staff did not know the customers — they knew them well. It was because nobody had decided which fields were required and which were optional.Translating Vtiger and SugarCRM into Turkish required real effort. Both programs shipped entirely in English in 2004. Menus, error messages, field labels — all English. Turkish language files were being assembled by community volunteers, and they were incomplete. Some fields had wrong translations, others had none at all. The date format needed to change from the American month/day/year to the Turkish standard of day/month/year. Turkish character support — the letters ğ, ü, ş, ı, ö, ç — had to be set correctly at the database level, otherwise customer names showed up as broken symbols. The tax identification field was built for a nine-digit American format; Turkish firms use a ten-digit number, so that field had to be added by hand. All of this was doable. But doing it required knowing it needed to be done, and setting aside time to actually do it. Small firms typically came to these projects unprepared. They expected to install the program and start using it immediately. When the setup stretched into a second week, patience began to run thin.The sharpest difficulty was the connection point with the accounting program. This firm used a popular Turkish accounting package — Logo’s commercial module — and had no intention of replacing it. Any order recorded in the CRM still had to be entered manually into the accounting system. That meant double data entry: first into the CRM, then a handwritten note to the accountant, then entry into the accounting program. At the time, building an automatic bridge between these two systems was a substantial project on its own. Neither Vtiger nor SugarCRM offered a ready-made connector. A file-based transfer was possible — export a list from the accounting program, import it into the CRM — but that was a manual, weekly task, not an automatic or instant one. Firms walked into these projects without knowing this limit existed. In Adana, I did not raise the integration boundary clearly enough at the start. By the third week, the owner believed the CRM would ‘talk to’ the accounting program on its own. Correcting that expectation in week three cost us trust we did not need to lose. Had I put it on the table in the first meeting, we would have designed around it from the beginning. That is a lesson I carried into every project afterward: name the integration limits before you write a single line of configuration.I am writing this to make a single point: if you are considering an open source CRM, your first question should not be ‘which program should we choose?’ Your first question should be this: ‘Where does our sales team currently store information about customers, and who updates that information, and when?’ Without an answer to that question, it does not matter whether you install Vtiger or SugarCRM — the program will sit open and empty. In Adana, we finished the project in six weeks. The first two weeks were not spent on software installation. They were spent mapping the customer card standard and walking through the steps of the sales process with the team. The sales staff kept saying ‘we handle it on the phone.’ We kept asking ‘yes, but where do you write down what you learned on the phone?’ That question — asked before touching the program — is what made the rest possible. Installing Vtiger really does take two days. Moving a customer relationship into the program first requires understanding that relationship yourself. When we started in Adana, the owner had five notebooks on his desk. When we finished, the notebooks were still there. But we both knew exactly when they would no longer be needed.
This article was originally published in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on January 8, 2004. The English edition has been reviewed and edited by the author.