GreenRope – A Simple yet Powerful CRM for E-Mail Marketers
A while ago I had the pleasure of talking with Austin Willms who took me through a tour presenting GreenRope, a CRM solution for small businesses that offers three ‘suites’ of functionality across ales, marketing, and operations. The operations suite probably needs a bit of explanation but is essentially the customer service portion plus functionality covering project- and event management, knowledge management, a wiki, collaboration and – important – the majority of contact management functionality. The Sales suite covers workflows, activities, leads, and contact handling and the marketing suite provides marketers with the tools they need to do their job. ‘Their job’ mainly being e-mail- and website-marketing, with some social media marketing added to it. This is something that GreenRope is particularly well geared for. The software has its origins as an e-mail marketing tool that evolved into a business suite of CRM-related tools that supports additional customer requirements. The objective behind it is to provide as many tools as possible in very affordable packages, while being able to support a nearly unlimited number of contacts. GreenRope has customers that run the solution for millions of contacts in their database. The philosophy behind GreenRope is that it shall make people effective, by allowing them to organize easily and efficiently. It is not necessarily there to serve as an immediately revenue generating tool. There is no preferred industry for GreenRope, although its ability to deal with millions of contacts shows a B2C affinity. This making it easy for users philosophy is also exhibited by GreenRope regularly sending mails that help in the onboarding process and the easily accessible and very...
Nimble and Microsoft are Getting ever Closer
It has been three months since I last talked with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other. Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any other smaller vendor tools. The logical next step is to … … integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365. I already speculated about this in my February post: Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail clients and spreedsheets – and MS Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce,...
SAP CRM and SAP JAM – Good News from CRM evolution
During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM – Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First Things First – After All I Am A CRM Guy Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many of these customers are net new customers. The challenge is that S4/HANA doesn’t have a CRM (yet). I have earlier already suggested two ways how this could change – marrying up the SAP Hybris family of modern CRM solutions or modernizing SAP CRM and integrating it into S4/HANA based upon HANA technology and therefore avoiding the costly CRM Middleware and data duplication. Both approaches have their merits: The cloud based SAP Hybris set of solutions is far more modern and already bases on the new SAP standard Fiori user interface. SAP CRM, on the other hand...
Mobile In-App Support – A brief Overview
In a mobile world, where the smartphone has become the command center of our lives support needs to be offered from directly inside the app, using in-app messaging. This way the advantages of being able to send relevant contextual information about the state of the app to the service agent and the ability to engage in a service conversation via a conversational UI can get brought to full advantage. The user is identified, relevant information has been gathered, which the service agent can use right away. This leads to capabilities that a genuine mobile in-app support system needs to have on top of generic help center functionality: In-App FAQ that gets pushed out to the phone and is available in an offline scenario Collation of meta data about the phone, user and the incident that created the support call, along with the ability to send that to the customer service center In-App messaging/conversational UI in combination with push notifications Automation to properly route incoming issues and to increase the issue resolution efficiency An ability to integrate into CRM- or other systems An ability to selectively and proactively engage with users, to e.g. support onboarding or push notifications about special situations to relevant parts of the user community. It is possible to find vendors that deliver parts or all of this in order to deliver a mobile service experience. Platforms like G2Crowd, but also traditional analyst companies like Forrester and Gartner give some leads. Gartner lists Salesforce, Pegasystems, Oracle, Microsoft, Zendesk as leaders in customer engagement centers, with SAP being the only Challenger and Lithium the only Visionary. None of...