R.I.P.

Recently, a friend's wife died after a long battle with Cancer.  May she rest in peace.

Although this Blog is titled "xRM for Life", I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about how CRM can conform to manage death related industries.

For starters, let's take a Funeral Home as an example.  One of the specific areas built into CRM that could be a huge benefit to a Funeral Home is Relationship Roles.  (It may even explain them a bit better to those who have tried to configure them but not gotten the results they had hoped for.)

Funeral Homes need to manage many indirect relationship types like Medical Examiner to The Deceased, Emergency Services (Police/Fire) to The Deceased, Relatives to The Deceased, etc.  Note below in the setup, there are two Relationship Roles established - one for each side of the relationship (Funeral Director/Deceased).  This allows the user to configure both sides when establishing or viewing the relationship from within the Contact record (either one).

As seen from the Contact record:

Furthermore, the Funeral Director needs to coordinate the services as requested by the family.  This entails things like music selection, facilities logistics, coordinating the order of events and Eulogies, etc.

The logistics parts (like reserving rooms and selecting the musician and securing the instrument, etc.) can be handled out-of-the-box with Service Activities, so I won't go too much into that since there's a nice writeup by MS in the CRM 3.0 Implementation Guide (IG section 23) examples (here). 

Another intuitive option to handle the actual Funerals themselves would be to rename the Campaign entity to "Funeral" so they could use planning tasks and campaign activities to broadcast ("Distribute") messages and content to invitees, and so on.  The only customization needed is to rename the entity!

Finally, there are all the sales parts to a typical Funeral Home where they sell products and services to the individuals and families.  I won't go into the dissertation of how unique this sales lifecycle is in this post but will try to insert glimpses in future related posts.  Just bear in mind that the strength and flexibility in CRM Sales fits this niche market perfectly.