We Blog CRM

Today, RightNow Technologies made a big move in encouraging CRM users to take up cloud platforms with the RightNow Cloud Services Agreement (CSA)—a client-focused approach to solution licensing. The overarching goal is to eradicate the hidden costs, intense maintenance bills, and shelfware often involved in current SaaS contract, filling in gaps to make contract negotiation simpler. In addition, RightNow is implementing a “Cloud Challenge”—their call to other vendors to “engage with clients like true cloud vendors, not on-premise vendors in cloud clothing,” says CEP Greg Gianforte.

The specifics of the RightNow CSA promise quicker implementations and innovations, and more customizable programs that allow users to pay based on usage and the number of users rather than choosing from a few pre-packaged plans. The present terms state that new RightNow users will be offered the CSA, and current customers will receive the offer when their present contracts are up for renewal; those new customers signing contracts under the CSA will be able to determine their renewal charges in the first contract. New users can also try RightNow CX, their flagship CRM product, for a 90-day trial with unlimited capacity.

And the RightNow CSA aims to bring tangible savings to customers. Allowing users to purchase only what they need are RightNow’s “seat months.” Seat months can be adjusted each year, are intended to do away with shelfware, and the concept will be especially helpful to users with seasonal businesses. Also pleasing to potential customers: RightNow pledges to return portions of a user’s subscription fees if the platform fails to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). As RightNow is promising cash back for SLA failures, they’ve fortified their SLAs, and therefore strengthened their product.

It’ll be interesting to see how other cloud vendors respond to RightNow’s developments. While announcing RightNow’s new cloud pricing model and the Cloud Challenge, Gianforte claimed that 30% of Salesforce.com CRM seats are shelfware. Things can sometimes get dicey when aggressively challenging your competitors like this, but it seems all in the spirit of better business, and we’re curious to see how it shapes SaaS CRM products.

The relation between CRM and social media is a valuable one, and this week it continues to grow as Zoho integrates the ability to login with Facebook Connect.

Zoho’s online productivity suite is constantly innovating, and already allows users to use their Google, Google Apps, and Yahoo accounts to log into Zoho Apps—in fact, Zoho says that most of their users login from other applications to use their products. Facebook Connect likewise allows Zoho users to login using Facebook identification, link the two accounts, and even share documents with Facebook users that don’t have Zoho accounts. This sharing of information across application is a great start to CRM transcending the traditional platform with the help of social media, and something we’ll likely see more of with the proliferation of Social CRM.

Interestingly, Zoho has been aware of social media’s influence for a while. They’ve had their own Facebook application since 2007, which allows users to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from within Facebook, and integrates with Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show for collaborative purposes. Zoho has always had a mind for the social and could find Facebook drives traffic their way—and indeed, with 400 million users, Facebook could be the crux of good Social CRM.

We’re always interested in Social CRM news here at blog CRM, and we’d like to mention here that the editors of Business-Software.com have released a new vendor report: Top 10 Social CRM Vendors. For anyone interested in the segment, or looking for a good Social CRM solution, it’s a must read!

Since last November’s Dreamforce convention, talk regarding Salesforce.com has been largely about Salesforce Chatter, their enterprise social network and collaboration platform. But since the beginning of the New Year they’ve announced their Spring ’10 update, and more recently, the Force.com Visual Process Manager—these updates are naturally less flashy without the weight of a company conference, but they are no less significant for the CRM market.

Visual Process Manager's flow-chart like, drag-and drop interface

Salesforce’s acquisition of Informavores—a call scripting startup in the UK—is the origin of the Visual Process Manager technology. Force.com house the Visual Process Manager, which will help those using Salesforce’s Enterprise and Unlimited editions to create business applications with established set forms, questions, and decision trees. Visual Process Manager leverages a drag-and-drop interface to help users design their business processes. There are four components, one of which is a “wizard builder,” which creates step-by-step guides for end users. The other elements are a process designer, a simulation tool for testing, and a process execution engine.

This is a smart move on several fronts. For starters, it’s going to mean more developers on the Force.com platform. Not that Force.com’s user bass was dwindling, but the Visual Process Manager will certainly be an auspicious addition. There has also been a recent rise in the use and development SaaS Business Process Management (BPM) tools, and Salesforce’s clout in the cloud space implies the Visual Process Manager will be successful.

On another note, we’re curious to see what other acquisition-borne tools Salesforce.com puts forth this year—that is, how they’ll be spending the $500 million they recently raised.

Earlier this month, Salesforce.com announced the 31st generation release that will bring new features to Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Force.com: Spring ’10. Salesforce offers three releases a year, but this latest one will bring an entirely new user interface. There weren’t a large number of details given outside of the press release—we’ll have to wait till Spring ‘10’s February release to see more, but there is a screenshot of what the new UI will look like (below).

For Sales Cloud 2, the new changes aim to keep sales teams efficient and generate more leads. Notably, there will be real-time quotes given—sales users will be able to generate quotes using relevant data—which is generate automatically for quoting purposes. In addition, to accommodate salespersons offering multiple quotes throughout the sales cycle, Spring ’10 has “quote sync” capabilities to sync the final quote with the opportunity in one click.

Service Cloud 2—Salesforce’s platform for merging contact center technologies with cloud computing platforms—will be endowed with Salesforce Answers, and entitlements and service contracts functionality as part of the Spring ‘10 release. Salesforce Answers will help companies leverage cloud data for customer service, and more importantly, allow users to initiate conversations through unique customer communities. The other aforementioned improvement comes in the form of call center operators having access to some of that cloud data as well—they’ll be able to track service entitlements and contracts.

And users of Force.com, Salesforce’s ever-popular development platform, will finally see Adobe Flash Builder for Force (which Salesforce announced back in October), and will also have the ability to run authenticated sites. Adobe Flash Player on Force was jointly developed, and is an integration that’ll enable building cloud-based apps that can be easily deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player. Spring ‘10’s authenticated sites feauter will allow companies to run public and private authenticated web sites from Force.com, and customers will easily be able to add security functionalities and create web sites for myriad purporses.

Again, we’ll have to wait and see how Spring ‘10 really performs, but things sound promising thus far. Salesforce.com can hardly make an update without their competitors matching it (or trying to), so we’re excited to see what else emerges this season.

Earlier this month, CRM Magazine drew attention to the retail industry as one in need of more CRM; another such industry with room for CRM improvement is perhaps a less obvious one: hotels.

There are 4.4 million hotel rooms in the United States, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA), and that number implies not only a wealth of places to stay, but the difficulty some hoteliers might face in keeping customers loyal to their establishments. The case of hotels and their guests is much the same as the relationship between airlines and their customers—they both rely heavily on customer rewards programs. But by and large, the hotel industry is not as far along on the rewards program spectrum. Larger hotels—especially casinos—have CRM implementations, but establishments of all sizes in that industry need more CRM.

The largest hotel chains make the most use of their CRM platforms, focusing mostly on loyalty programs that primarily benefit frequent travelers. These rewards programs usually take the form of discounts for extended stays, and deals on rooms based on points accumulated from frequent visits. As stated previously, it is much the same as an airline’s loyalty program, but examples from airline initiatives prove there is more to be done.

For example, many airlines and online travel agents will email customers with upgrade opportunities with the confirmation of their ticket purchase. There are some hotels with a similar practice, but most hotels do not do this—even though for some it could generate millions in revenue.

Examples of large hotels using CRM efficiently often come from casinos. Harrah’s Casinos have developed a means of not only tracking customer behavior, but doing it during their stay. Guests are given a “Harrah’s card” when they check in to be used as a credit card during their stay, and tracking these purchases in real-time allows the hotels to offer rewards while guests are there—it’s been a hit for ensuring repeat business. Some hotels also have a breakout of guests by room, keeping track of which customers are traveling as families, for business, etc.

Those hotels most in need of CRM are the second-tier establishments, of which the AHLA estimates there are more than 49,000, with a minimum of 15 rooms apiece. It’s unclear why exactly CRM implementations are underused in the hospitality industry. It could be confusion about what such programs are; it could also be confusion about deployment costs. Still, there are plenty of CRM vendors offering platforms for hotels, and web-based CRM is certainly affordable—for a single guest property, SaaS CRM systems can be deployed for $75,000 to $120,000 per year.

Real-time data has catalyzed a lot of races of late, and it is becoming more and more important for hotels to capture guest information and cater to their needs in very specific ways.

At last year’s Dreamforce, we saw just how aggressive SugarCRM could be when they staged a guerilla marketing attack. Well, it seems the open-source CRM provider is aggressive in all aspects of business, as they reported a record year in 2009.

While the majority of companies struggled to bring in money—and stay afloat even—SugarCRM had a record year in revenue, customer base, community, and partner development. They added a reported 2,000 commercial customers last year, and 50 new value-added resellers; these new VARs extend SugarCRM’s reach to over 75 countries as well.

Larry Augustin, who took the Sugar helm toward the end of last year, expressed excitement about the company’s current standing, nothing it leaves them prepared for a great 2010. Last year, Sugar partnered with Microsoft to provide Sugar applications on Windows Azure, and they also released their Community Edition on Amazon EC2. Putting the Community Edition on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud allows developers to access, test, and develop Sugar code, making it all the more accessible.

Like any good CEO, Augustin also conveyed excitement about new products coming out in 2010, and Sugar already seems poised to wow customers with new editions. Jigsaw reported recently that the SugarCRM platform is one of the three most-used CRM products globally. In addition, with many predicting that private clouds will be discredited—but not eliminated—in 2010, Sugar will likely be a top choice for public deployments.

DocVerse's activity stream

Looks like Google is determined to remain competitive in the small business CRM market, as today they announced they are closing an acquisition of DocVerse, a service facilitating collaboration around Microsoft Office documents. Given the number of small businesses managing CRM via free online applications, this could be big news.

San Francisco-based DocVerse has previously been called a tool for turning Microsoft Office into Google Docs—once participating parties have downloaded the plug-in, they can share documents with one another and view them on the web. Whether users are online or offline, DocVerse will track, manage and sync changes and merge them into one updated document. Users can talk over changes through an included instant messaging platform. Another neat feature offered by DocVerse: an activity stream that is viewable with MS Office, any web browser, or an RSS stream.

In so many ways, this is Google returning the challenge Microsoft posed earlier this year when they announced Office 2010 would tout Web Apps, an online component allowing document sharing and real-time collaboration functionalities. They decided to make Office more like Google Docs, and now Google is upping the ante by actually taking Office to their own platform. The acquisition is not yet finalized, but it will be interesting to see how this online-documents brawl plays out next year. Plenty of small business users house their information with Google, but there are many who just use the Microsoft Office suite, and might not be swayed toward Google’s Office-friendly collaboration without an added incentive.

Google also recently acquired Appjet, creators of the real-time collaboration tool EtherPad, and that team has since been working with Google Wave, and the source code has been released. Still, it will be interesting to see if they bring Appjet and DocVerse talent together.

Today, Zoho announced the production release of Zoho Reports, their online reporting and business intelligence tool. Zoho CRM products are wholly web-based, and Zoho Reports emerges with a new pricing model and features after two years in beta. It was formerly known as Zoho DB, and it facilitates data analysis for database administrators and developers.

The new functionalities found in the Zoho Reports’ commercial release are new dashboards and an iGoogle gadget; pricing plans for the new release begin at $15 per month (250,000 rows and 2 users). With the dashboard view, users can collate similar reports and view them all on a single page. The iGoogle gadget, meanwhile, allows users to embed the gadget version of Zoho Reports on their iGoogle homepage, giving them greater access to important data.

A free edition of Zoho Reports will be offered in addition, and features intrinsic to both versions include the ability to upload from a variety of data sources, including Excel and HTML files, and support for both on-demand and on-premise business suites and databases. Zoho Reports also offers a drag-and-drop interface, and collaborative tools through which users can work together on reports. Zoho is also promising secure data.

As a small business CRM vendor, Zoho competes with Google Apps and the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 2010, so they’ve implemented a less traditional business model: continually launching new products and offerings to their existing products. It’s certainly paid off—they currently have over 2 million users—and it will be interesting to see how Zoho, as the lesser-known brand, remains competitive during the next year.

SugarCRM announced today that their partnership with KnowledgeTree and iNetProcess will take them to the commercial enterprise content management (ECM) space. SugarCRM is known as a leader in open-source CRM offerings, and KnowledgeTree is an ECM provider that focuses on affordable document management software (DMS); iNetProcess is a European provider of services around open source CRM and DMS applications, and provides the architecture behind the new application, iNetDocs.

iNetDocs offers seamless integration between data stored in KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM, so users leveraging the app can search, browse, and retrieve information from documents and folders in the KnowledgeTree repository, and view them on the SugarCRM platform. A tab within the Sugar interface connects directly to the KnowledgeTree information, and said info can be added to lead and contact information when necessary.

The free community edition of iNetDocs has been available for about year to SugarCRM users, and the commercial edition will offer some new features and customer support. It will be available in the SaaS and on-premise versions of both KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM , and starts at $1490 for 20 users.

Content management and CRM systems are a natural fit, and this new venture will doubtless save users plenty of time switching between applications. The ECM space is growing pretty steadily, so it’ll be interesting to see exactly what the new features are offering in the commercial version iNetDocs that set it apart.

For companies offering CRM lite solutions, or CRM for small businesses, Google Apps has acted as a formidable opponent. But some companies, like on-demand CRM provider Zoho, have smartly  relied on the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” motto, and today they announced the launch of a full integration between Google Docs and their Apps.

Zoho has previously launched a sign-in integration with Google Apps, but with this new integration, users can attach files from Google Docs to Zoho CRM within Leads, Accounts, and Cases. Users who want to attach a document from Google Docs will be prompted to authenticate using their Google credentials (via oAuth), and when that is done, the document will be listed in Zoho CRM. Users will also be able to attach Google Docs files while composing messages in Zoho Mail, by uploading the documents directly from Google Docs or Zoho Docs.

Zoho Projects is another application now integrated with Google Apps. First, the productivity startup launched Zoho Projects for Google Apps, and now users have the option to attach documents from Google to the “Documents” module in Zoho Projects.

This latest integration is another step in Zoho’s strategy of improving their existing product with add-ons and integrating with bigger names. They also support Microsoft SharePoint, and Yahoo IDs. It will be interesting to see how this strategy fares with the upcoming release of Microsoft 2010.

Below, a presentation outlining the Google Docs integration: