SeriousBox narrowcasting CRM

Selling screen time to bars is a business made of a great many small facts. Which venue, which owner, which advertiser, which keyword, when the contract renews, and whether the telemarketer who called last Tuesday got anywhere. The CRM is where all of that lived, and it is the reason anyone at Next Level knew what the company actually had.

How a venue got into it

The system starts as a list of leads, not customers. A lead appears when someone asks for a telephone number in a given municipality: that request is itself the signal that a venue exists and might be worth calling. A telemarketer follows it up and reports back immediately, and the location picks up a status that follows it from then on.

Once a venue signs, it gets one or more SMS accounts: a login and a keyword of its own. From that point the account accumulates. What was sent, what came back, what it cost, when it ends.

That accumulation is the part worth pointing at. A CRM full of contact details is an address book. The value was in what could be read back out of it: usage against cost, which venues were about to lapse, which advertisers were worth calling again. The demands moved constantly as the market did, so the system was never finished, and the reporting kept changing shape because the questions did.

What it was built from

Smarty templates and PHP over MySQL, partly Symfony2 later on, with SOAP and XML web services carrying messages between the applications in the system.

It ran in Belgium and Germany as well as the Netherlands, SMS services included, so it was multilingual from the start rather than translated afterwards. That is a much easier thing to decide at the beginning than to retrofit once a database is full of Dutch.

It is one part of a larger system, described on the narrowcasting application page.