How can we improve WHMCS?

I agree -- I think rather than a very general 'let's get CRM functionality' and try and do everything, there should be a specific analysis of which CRM features are not yet available in WHMCS, then we should be voting on those individual features.

As one sample CRM app, there's already tons of overlap between SugarCRM and WHMCS with regards to support management for clients. WHMCS already has notes for clients, each product, each invoice, each ticket, etc. In many ways WHMCS is already most of a CRM solution, just without the sales-aspects of CRM software.

Specific CRM features that I think would be very helpful to have in WHMCS that aren't currently available and without (hopefully) requiring a massive undertaking are:

- Improvements to the To-Do system to match the level of granularity and control that the WHMCS project management plugin provides. Drag and drop, easy updating of status of tasks, and multiple-admin visibility / management of task and more. Ultimately this would integrate with iWHMCS and aWHMCS and supply push notifications for due / overdue tasks, etc.

- Contacts that are not clients. We would need to be able to have conversations and log information for people without them actually being a client just yet.

- Opportunities or as 37 Signals' Highrise calls them 'Deals' (I prefer Deals) which are in many ways similar to a quote, but mostly for internal tracking rather than sending to a client.

We could consider contacts pre-clients with the objective (and process flow) of converting contacts to clients. Similarly Deals (or opportunities) could be converted to a quote or a product if we skip the quote stage.

There could also be a subclass of support ticket (basically just another department) for pre-sales to manage all communications with contacts who are not yet clients.

And that's pretty much it! Perhaps fancy features could come later, such as pulling info from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, but that's not really necessary for a first release.

Don't think it's out of scope. Many companies have all their customer data in whmcs: names, phone numbers and emails. And this information is quite update.
Also you can have several contacts for each customer, related quotes and invoices, and even mailing, so it's the next logical step: management of the already owned clients data.

Adding CRM features doesn't mean whmcs will be in general slower. And integration with external full-equiped CRMs can be hard to achieve, as there are many CRMs with many versions and I don't want whmcs developers taking care of the last sugar/salesforce/whatever version.

Let's get deeper in this request: which CRM features are needed exactly?

I agree making it easier to integrate with existent CRM's is a better way to go.

Maybe some synchronization between WHMCS and existing CRMs? Turning WHMCS into a full blown CRM might be out of scope, but an add-on would be nice. I just don't want WHMCS to become bloated and slow, like a lot of CRMs I've seen.

Maybe integration with Vtiger Crm - good existing solution integrated with Asterisk...

Like this one along with the Notes section just a tab where we can note calls in to the Support Centre, information about the call and action taken. Even the ability to add to a Support Ticket to keep track of all the information being passed through.

At the moment the only option is via the Notes in the Support Ticket but this isn't ideal

Fantastic feature request!

I really think our sales team would love something like this.