New NetSuite SuiteCommerce Combines Core Operational Commerce Platform with Externally Facing, Touchpoint-Agnostic Experience Management System

Delivers Unified Platform for B2B, B2C and Machine2Machine Commerce Models

Completely Flexible Front-End Technology Enables Support for Any Touchpoint, Embraced by Leading Commerce Design Firms

SAN FRANCISCO — NetSuite SuiteWorld 2012 — NetSuite Inc., the industry’s leading vendor of cloud-based business management software suites, today announced NetSuite "Commerce as a Service" (CaaS), enabling businesses to manage their interactions with other businesses and directly with consumers via a cloud platform that delivers the customer experience, via any current or future device, directly on the core NetSuite cloud ERP/CRM business management application.  At the heart of the CaaS initiative is NetSuite SuiteCommerce, a new commerce-aware platform that provides a central system to manage all transactions and associated customer interactions with consumers and other businesses regardless of touchpoint (website, smart phone, social media site, in-store, etc.). 

"Over the past decade, NetSuite has transformed how our customers operate their businesses internally. Over the next decade, NetSuite will transform how businesses operate with other businesses and with their customers through NetSuite Commerce as a Service. Our new NetSuite SuiteCommerce offering is at the heart of this transformation," said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. "By transforming the NetSuite business application into a commerce-aware platform, we enable our customers to extend the richest set of cloud operational capabilities available anywhere directly to their customers, regardless of the device those customers are using – be it a smart phone, a tablet, a personal computer, a point-of-sale system, or touchpoints not yet developed."

At the turn of the century, driven by widespread adoption of the Internet by businesses and consumers, commerce evolved from a process that was conducted on the phone or in a retail setting to the ability to sell online via websites. This drove the introduction of stand-alone "eCommerce" applications designed to support the emerging requirement to sell online.

Consumers quickly adopted eCommerce for its global accessibility, 24×7 availability and diversity of products. Because the industry evolved rapidly and companies were typically running their back end operations on legacy systems such as Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, Sage or SAP systems locked behind firewalls with no Web capabilities, companies were forced to implement disconnected solutions for selling online, resulting in fragmented customer information built with a distribution channel focus – one set of applications dedicated to retail channel, a separate set of applications for eCommerce channels, and yet another  for telesales operations. Increasingly, companies recognize that implementations of first-generation eCommerce systems such as Demandware, and Magento have resulted in frustrated customers and ever-increasing integration costs as eCommerce becomes a core business competence.

In addition, the proliferation of new end-user preferred "touchpoints" such as smart phones and social media has increased customers’ expectations of a tailored, individualized experience. Consumers assume businesses have full visibility to their transactions across touchpoints and will use that knowledge to provide an optimized experience. Likewise, businesses expect their suppliers to have insight into their business relationships, and assume that they will deliver a B2B experience as compelling as a B2C website.  Finally, physical products increasingly include commerce-embedded capabilities, which enable machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce without the involvement of humans, based upon defined business rules for predictable needs. Enterprises of all sizes have been challenged to respond to this avalanche of requirements because of the speed of change and the daunting burden of integrating inter-related systems to efficiently transact business across these various interaction points.

Rather than take the bolt-on approach of first generation eCommerce systems that attempted to cobble together multiple systems to address emerging customers and business requirements, NetSuite SuiteCommerce enables companies to manage their interaction with customers regardless of channel directly from the most widely used cloud-native business management system. By doing so, NetSuite’s integrated ERP/CRM system is transformed into a commerce engine that is exposed to customers in a device-independent way – supporting traditional browser-based commerce as well as any emerging touchpoint such as smart phones, tablets and POS systems.  Because of both the presentation layer and business logic flexibility, the architecture supports any business model, be it B2C, B2B, M2M, or any combination thereof.

"Every company wants to deliver the commerce experience that Apple delivers to customers – an experience that recognizes the customer regardless of channel or device, and efficiently delivers goods and services in world-class fashion, projecting a powerful brand message. NetSuite SuiteCommerce is architected to enable companies of all sizes to deliver this type of rich, touchpoint-agnostic experience to their customers," added Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. "The secret sauce behind the Apple and NetSuite approach is an integrated back-end system that combines core business processing capabilities with rich customer profiles, to deliver the brand promise of a personalized experience, anytime from anywhere."

NetSuite SuiteCommerce is the result of several years of development. SuiteCommerce exposes native NetSuite commerce capabilities – including merchandising, pricing, promotions, payment processing, support management, and customer management – as services that can be leveraged by any presentation layer, while providing an integrated back-end business management system.

The NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform includes several new important technologies:

• SuiteCommerce Experience – The SuiteCommerce Experience is the page serving and development framework that enables companies to deliver rich user experiences, regardless of touchpoint. The SuiteCommerce Experience is so flexible that it enables designers to create any type of customer experience – from page layout to interaction design. Leading eCommerce design agencies including Fluid, Sweden Interactive, Live Area Labs and Pod1, among others, joined as initial customer experience partners supporting the SuiteCommerce Platform. In addition to supporting any experience design, SuiteCommerce Experience is extremely scalable and high performance. Whereas the industry standard is sub 2-second page load time, SuiteCommerce Experience offers sub-second page times by avoiding the redundant rendering and downloading associated with traditional presentation frameworks.
• SuiteCommerce Services –The SuiteCommerce Platform includes a new group of services called SuiteCommerce Services that expose NetSuite’s back-end commerce functionality and data as services to the SuiteCommerce Experience and any other commerce front-end application. These services, combined with associated SuiteCloud development tools, enable customers to develop new business logic and leverage that business logic across multiple touchpoints. For example, promotions can be implemented once and enabled across online, telephone and in-store transactions to augment the core transactional capabilities, and customize the system to their exact requirements. Leading B2C and B2B commerce providers such as Square, Stripe, SPS Commerce and Retail Anywhere have announced new product offerings to support omni-channel commerce on top of the SuiteCommerce Services platform.
• NetSuite Commerce Platform –The NetSuite Commerce Platform provides the core native business processing capabilities to run modern commerce operations.  Including order management, inventory management and payment processing with personalized promotions, merchandising, account management and support management technologies, NetSuite SuiteCommerce delivers the industry’s most robust cloud-based commerce management technologies. 

The power of providing an integrated experience and cross-channel business logic with SuiteCommerce is apparent in an infinite number of modern use cases:

• Retail:  When customers appear in a retail setting, not only will they be recognized, but store clerks will also be able to see on their point-of-sale system what is in their eCommerce shopping cart or wish list as they serve them. 
• Multi-Channel Business Logic:  Since SuiteCommerce offers a single back-end system for processing orders, managing inventory and generating offers, a business rule such as a maximum number of purchases on a sale item, can be implemented once and enforced across the website, in-store and via telesales.
• Rich Customer Profile driving promotions:  SuiteCommerce provides a single system for customer history, product/item details, and promotions management.  For example, a promotion could be created in seconds targeting customers who have purchased more than $1,000 across any channel and offer a limited time 30 percent off promotion on any item with a gross margin greater than 50 percent.

Product Configurations:

There are two versions of NetSuite SuiteCommerce, one designed to meet the needs of small and mid-sized enterprises and one designed for large and very large enterprises. 

NetSuite SuiteCommerce Mid-market is available immediately and includes the core functionality of SuiteCommerce Services, as well as access to a number of add-on modules including product feeds, ratings and reviews, and loyalty programs.  It is designed to support companies with smaller order volumes and product catalogs.

NetSuite SuiteCommerce Enterprise includes the entire SuiteCommerce offering (SuiteCommerce Experience and SuiteCommerce Services Platform).  It provides support for enterprise scale order volumes and product/item catalogs.

NOTE: NetSuite, the NetSuite logo and SuiteCommerce are registered service marks of NetSuite Inc.

Source: PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1bTkW)

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

Survey of Nearly 200 IT Professionals Finds Proliferation of Mobile Devices in the Workplace Continues to Create Management and Security Problems

The role of IT managers has changed drastically in a short period of time – revolutionized by smart mobile devices and increased remote connection tools. While end users in the workforce are rapidly making use of these advances, IT managers are trying to find the best way to maintain control of their IT environments. In order to determine how IT managers are keeping pace, LANDesk Software, a leading provider of systems lifecycle management, endpoint security and IT service management, recently surveyed 193 IT professionals regarding how they are adapting to the rapidly evolving new mobile workforce.

LANDesk surveyed 193 IT managers and administrators in medium-to-large size enterprise organizations. Of those surveyed, 96 percent reported that end users in their organizations are now using two or more computing devices in the workplace; however, only 75 percent reported that they are actually managing two or more devices per user. This disconnect shows that end users are adopting more devices quicker than IT managers can keep pace.

Additional survey findings include:

• 44 percent of those surveyed said at least part of their workforce works remotely.
• 77 percent of those surveyed said end users use their personal mobile devices in the workplace.
• 54 percent of those surveyed reported that they do not currently have a security strategy for mobile devices in place.
• 37 percent of those surveyed reported that they deal with more than 10 malware incidents a month

In order to further illustrate its survey findings, LANDesk commissioned an infographic summary of the results, which can be found at http://www.landesk.com/newmobileworkforce/.

“Virtually everything we read in the press and hear firsthand from our customers, points to the fact that IT is on the cusp of a radical change, and end user computing will never be the same,” said Steve Workman, vice president, LANDesk. “The days of provisioning and maintaining a single computing platform, locking down work environments and mandating productivity systems are dead. This survey of mobile device management drives these points home. We surveyed a cross section of IT managers and administrators, and their feedback shows the dramatic nature of this shift and emphasizes the immediacy of the change.”

About LANDesk Software

LANDesk Software is a leading provider of systems lifecycle management, endpoint security, and IT service management solutions for desktops, servers and mobile devices across the enterprise. LANDesk enables IT to deliver business value by gaining control of end-user computing with a single console, light infrastructure, and ITIL solutions that deliver significant ROI for thousands of customers worldwide. LANDesk is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, with offices located in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, and can be found at www.landesk.com.

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

Guy Kawasaki to Deliver Keynote Address

CUPERTINO, Calif. – SugarCRM, the world’s fastest-growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced its 6th annual SugarCon event that will bring CRM thought leaders from around the world together under one roof. The 2012 keynote speaker will be Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com, founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures and columnist for the Open Forum of American Express. SugarCon, geared toward customers, partners and developers in the CRM space, will be held April 23-26, 2012 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California.

The theme of the 2012 event is “Explore the Possibilities of CRM,” where speakers will present thought-provoking sessions that inspire the audience to dig deeper into the CRM discipline. In addition to Kawasaki, this year’s speaker lineup includes:

• Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light and president of The 56 Group, LLC, an enterprise applications consulting services firm
• Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of ThinkJar, an advisory and research think tank focused on customer strategies
• Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, social media executive education program director at UCLA, Anderson School of Business, and adjunct professor measurement of PR and marketing at Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California
• Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM

A full agenda will be available prior to the event, and SugarCRM is currently calling attendees to recommend topics and speakers to ensure that the event delivers information that conference participants demand. The event will have seven breakout tracks that tackle beginner through advanced CRM topics – CRM 101, CRM and the Cloud, CRM and the Cutting Edge: Mobile, Social Business, Solving Business Problems with the Sugar Platform, Shortcuts Through the Sugar Exchange, and Sugar U. (Sugar University).

For more information on SugarCon 2012, please visit the event web site. To register for the event, visit the registration page, and to sponsor, see the sponsorship details. To learn more about SugarCRM, become a Facebook, fan, follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube channel and blog.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM makes CRM simple. As the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 850,000 end users in 192 countries. Over 7,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM’s On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise. For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

WHEN: Feb 5-8, 2012

eXtremeCRM is ALL about building technical capacity so you can keep driving phenomenal CRM growth!

eXtremeCRM 2012 Berlin will deliver 300 – 400 level technical content in our Deploy and Extend tracks geared towards the technical people in your organization.  Here are just a few of the highlights!

We have a great line up of speakers from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product team in Redmond!

Mike Ehrenberg, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect for Microsoft Dynamics will deliver a technical vision keynote giving insights to the future of Microsoft technologies.

Craig Dewar, Director, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Management and Eric Boocock, Sr. Technical Product Manager will to go deep on the recent fall release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (R7) and the future roadmap of Microsoft Dynamics CRM!

Murat Ozturan, Principal Program Manager Lead, will also be in Berlin to deliver technical sessions.

Marco Amoedo and Fadi El-Hennawy, both expert Technology Specialists from Microsoft EMEA will be presenting as well.

We also have a superior group of technical experts from within the Microsoft Dynamics community, who will be speaking including Ramon Tebar Bueno (Barclays), Sebastian Waksmundzki (AlfaPeople), Giorgio Garcia-Agreda (Crionet) Matt Parks (Avanade), Shan McArthur (ADXStudio), Jakub (Kuba) Skalbania (Netwise Sp. z.o.o.) and Dino Esposito, well know author and .Net expert. And the list keeps growing…

There is a fully packed agenda that can benefit partners and customers alike – here are just a few of the highlights:

• Fall release (R7) plus a look ahead at R8 and beyond
• Azure & Microsoft Dynamics CRM Better Together
• Web Services & Code Generation Deep Dive
• Advanced SharePoint Integration
• Agile Project Management with SureStep
• Software Development Lifecycle with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Silverlight & Microsoft Dynamics CRM Development Tips & Tricks
• JavaScript Best Practices
• Outlook Client: Deployment, Performance & Security
• Patterns & Practices

There is not a better opportunity to go eXtreme in building your technical capacity! Don’t miss this once a year chance to build your skills.

For more information: http://extremecrm.com/eXtremeCRM2012BerlinH.aspx

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

Pre-built Integration using Concur Connect Platform Delivers Single Entry, Compliant Expense Reporting

PLEASANTON, Calif.  — Veeva Systems introduces a new integration between Concur’s expense reporting system and Veeva CRM. Now, pharmaceutical sales representatives can simplify and streamline expense reporting using Veeva CRM as the single point of entry for call related expenses — a significant advantage considering the fact that most reps spend more than 70% of their time traveling for meetings with doctors across ever-growing territories. With such extensive travel and entertainment in a highly regulated industry, managing expenses and allocating each expense line item accurately is not only a huge administrative burden, but also a regulatory risk.

Concur’s cloud-based travel and expense management solution — used extensively within the pharmaceutical industry — enables reps to create, review and approve expense reports, as well as book and change travel itineraries. However, up until now, users had to do "double entry" — once in their CRM system and then again in their expense reporting system. With the new integration between Veeva CRM and Concur, users instead simply complete their call activity in Veeva CRM, and transactions flow seamlessly into Concur. Veeva’s latest product release also accurately aligns incurred expenses with the appropriate customer, simplifying compliance with Sunshine Act requirements.

"With the Concur Connect Platform, it’s quick and easy for application providers like Veeva to integrate their systems directly into Concur, yielding advantages for both the customer and the individual user," added Barry Padgett, EVP, Concur Connect Platform services at Concur. "Reps love the fact that they no longer have to do double entry and managers appreciate the efficiency. It’s a perfect example of the power of cloud computing and a smart marriage of two well-developed applications."

Brian Longo, senior director, Product Management, concluded "we are always looking for innovative ways to simplify our end user’s experience and reduce administrative tasks. The integration of Concur’s popular expense reporting application is a great way to leverage the strengths of both systems to enhance sales force effectiveness and operational efficiency."

About Concur

Concur is a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions. Concur’s easy-to-use Web-based and mobile solutions help companies and their employees control costs and save time. Concur’s systems adapt to individual employee preferences and scale to meet the needs of companies from small to large.

About Veeva Systems

Veeva Systems is the leader in cloud-based business solutions for the global life sciences industry. Committed to innovation, product excellence and customer success, Veeva has over 100 customers, ranging from the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to emerging biotechs. Founded in 2007, Veeva is a privately held company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices in Philadelphia, Barcelona, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo. For more information, visit www.veevasystems.com .

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

LiveSalesforceTraining.com to provide unemployed with needed skills to fill the technology gap in corporate America

SCRANTON, Pa. — Live Salesforce Training (http://livesalesforcetraining.com) the global consulting firm focused on results based solutions for the Social Enterprise announced that it is offering free Salesforce.com training for a variety of roles. The aim of the initiative is to deliver needed training that provides unemployed technology professionals with relevant skills that businesses demand.

"Employers are unable to fill jobs with the current talent pool. Technology changes rapidly, and IT professionals often lack the skills needed by companies. This skill gap is based on a lack of alignment between the candidates companies seek and skill sets IT professionals possess. The result is underemployed and unemployed individuals", according to Ivan Feher, principal at Live Salesforce Training. Network engineers with experience in hot technologies like Cloud Computing, and database developers are among the technology positions in top demand, according to a national Robert Half survey and projections for the fourth quarter of 2011.

"Job creation is a principal concern for government. However, there has not been a focused effort and investment in creating the skills needed to fill these jobs. There is a need to deliver tailored agile technology solutions to customers going beyond a mere general application of technologies. Successful candidates need to complement technical skills, with strong business skills, industry skills, and collaboration skills. Knowledge of how to apply these skills to building organizational brands is also critical," continues Feher.

LiveSalesforceTraining.com is spearheading a training program to unemployed individuals with Cloud Computing and software as a service (SaaS) courses for different roles that can include, Social Media, Marketing, Lead Generation, Customer Service Rep (CSR), Analytics, Forecasting, Portals, Dashboards and others. For details visit: http://www.livesalesforcetraining.com/list-of-classes

Those interested in Salesforce.com training should submit their entry at http://www.livesalesforcetraining.com/unemployed and tell us your story in terms of the challenges you face being unemployed and how this training can help you. You are encouraged to include a brief video that is under 2 minutes.

About Live Salesforce Training

Live Salesforce Training helps organizations of all sizes quickly adapt to changes in their business environment for a competitive advantage. We accomplish this by aligning innovative technologies with business best practices to facilitate success. From Cloud deployments to sustainability programs, we have worked with Salesforce.com since 1999. Live Salesforce Training is a service of Customer For Life with headquarters in Scranton, Pennsylvania and customers worldwide.

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

Even second-, third-, and fourth-generation investments in CRM yields significant returns

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications continue to deliver high return on investment (ROI), with an average benefit of $5.60 returned for every dollar spent, according to a Nucleus Research analysis.

Where other software areas show smaller incremental returns after reaping the greatest benefits in initial deployments, CRM was found to deliver significant ROI throughout its lifecycle, often enhanced by further investment. Organizations effectively deploying secondary applications, such mobile, social, marketing optimization and sales analytics can see triple-digit ROI while greatly increasing employee productivity. By deploying applications that run on top of existing CRM, companies have also seen an improvement in business forecasting and an increase in sales.

"With a return of $5.60 for every dollar spent, investing in CRM is a no-brainer. Further, that investment has significant staying power. As vendors add social, marketing, analytics, and mobile access capabilities to their offerings, organizations have an opportunity to gain even more returns from CRM," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research, Nucleus Research.

With reductions in the cost of deployment via the cloud, a focus on end user productivity, and a push towards social and mobile applications, there have been fundamental shifts in the goals of the CRM market that contribute to maintaining a high ROI. This has driven vendors to produce more rapid deployments that are developed through continued innovation in this space.

The full research note is available at NucleusResearch.com.

About Nucleus Research

Nucleus Research is a global provider of investigative, case-based technology research and advisory services that provide real-world insight into maximizing technology value. For more information, visit NucleusResearch.com.

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

X2Engine today announced the availability of X2Contacts beta, a new open source, Social Sales Management Application. Founded in early 2011 by veteran CRM software entrepreneur John Roberts, the company has been in stealth mode designing and developing X2Contacts, a next generation open source, social sales application for small and medium sized businesses.

“In today’s global economy, all companies need sales management applications in order to be competitive. The problem has been these apps have become so huge and complex, it’s impossible to implement the simple and straight-forward sales processes that actually make reps more knowledgeable and effective,” said John Roberts, Founder and CEO of X2Engine. “X2Contacts was designed to streamline contact and sales actions into one compact, blog-style user interface. We added contact and colleague social feeds into the equation, and the result is sales representatives become smarter and more effective resulting in increased sales and higher customer satisfaction.”

What makes X2Contacts unique in the crowded Customer Relationship Management (CRM) field is its compact, blog-style user interface. Interactive and collaborative tools which users are already familiar with from social networking sites such as; tagging pictures, shared docs, newsfeeds, group chat, discussions boards and rich mobile and iPad apps, are combined within a compact, lightning fast, contact sales management application. Reps are able to make more sales contacts while leveraging the combined social intelligence of peers, enabling them to add more value to their customer interactions leading to higher close rates.

San Jose BMW Motorcycles Customer Profile

San Jose BMW sells and services BMW motorcycles for the San Francisco Bay Area and has been using a pre-release version of X2Contacts for the past six months. “As an early customer design partner, I have been very impressed with the compactness of X2Contacts coupled with it’s results-oriented sales management foundation,” said Chris Hodgson, owner of San Jose BMW Motorcycles. “Now capturing leads from our website visitors and having our sales folks respond in minutes has increased our dealership lead management effectiveness. The integrated social media tools provide my sales team with real time knowledge of customers’ interests resulting in more effective sales interactions. Simply put, we are interacting with our customers faster and with more actionable knowledge.“

For a live demonstration, a detailed feature list and screen shot library please visit http://www.x2contacts.com. X2Contacts takes advantage of the latest open source software including Apache, PHP, MySQL and Linux (LAMP). X2Studio, an administrative tool, allows developers to create and share new application modules without any programming knowledge. Additionally X2Contacts supports HTML5, iPad, iPhone and Android mobile phones. X2Contacts is fully internationalized and has been localized into six languages with more on the way. X2Contacts can be downloaded from GitHub, Code.Google.com and SourceForge.net, and is licensed under the GPLv3. X2Engine plans to roll out commercial support and private virtual server hosting packages in October with additional details to be provided in the near future.

New World Wide Partner Program

Additionally, the company announced today the introduction of its Worldwide Partner Program, designed to support X2Engine partners across the globe. The program includes specialized developer, administration, hosting and sales management resources and training. Working with global partners is a key part of the companies’ go-to-market strategy.

“With this first beta of X2Contacts, we are introducing our World Wide Channel Partner Program for IT consulting, hosting and solution providers,” said John Roberts, Founder & CEO of X2Engine. “Now companies across the globe can work with partners offering X2Contacts hosting, administration, support and consulting services.”

About X2Engine

X2Engine Inc. of Scotts Valley, with offices in downtown Santa Cruz, California was founded in 2011 by John Roberts, a veteran Customer Relationship Management and Open Source software entrepreneur. The company provides software and hosting for X2Contacts, an open source sales management application developed by X2Engine Inc.

For more information, visit http://www.x2engine.com or email matthew(at)x2engine(dot)com

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

I am starting to see a trend for companies using Radian6 and other social enterprise monitoring products.

Companies are responding to people’s complaints or queries directly through social media. Wake up everyone, it’s not the just the 1-800 Call Center anymore.

With social enterprise monitoring products, companies look for keywords such as their own company, other band names (i.e. competition), and mis-spelled names. By scraping the web, they find as many social media sites as possible to find negative and positive feedback.

The monitoring software allows them to drill down and find out exactly what people are saying or thinking about the company, good or bad.

By responding in real time, this helps improves the public perception of the company.

Success is making customers happy, one customer at a time. Hopefully, that customer will share their experience via Facebook and Twitter.  And that’s the power of spreading the message, virally.

The Facebook Fan Page

Another trend emerging with companies using social media monitoring tools are treating their Facebook Fan Page as serious as their own corporate web site.

Social media *is* an integrated marketing plan for any business.

By having a contest and engaging Facebook readers to “post on your wall” whether it’s a testimonial or uploading a video, that’s the community companies want to see.  And with 700 million users on Facebook, that’s a large sample pool to choose from.

But it doesn’t end there.  Eventually you’ll want to draw your readers to your web site and make those conversions.  Loyal  and repeat customers are the best customers.  I think everyone knows that.

Again, it doesn’t end there.  By using Heroku for Facebook, you can build real anything as a Facebook app, including a storefront from your goods, without even leaving the Facebook page.  Now you have two store fronts, one web and one Facebook.

What used to be a brick and mortar industry with real storefronts, sales clerks and cashiers changed with web ecommerce over a decade ago.  Now that revolution is changing.

However, will customer service agents and help desk call centers be a thing of the past?

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

SohoOS, a simple way to manage your micro-business for free.

If you ever have run a small business, or even worked as a freelance / micro business, you know that at any given time you are doing 100 things at once. As a result, when at the computer, you might have 10 + applications open at any one time.  Often, many of these are not integrated. In fact, many may not even be properly adapted to for maximum benefit, as all of this costs either time or money.

Now imagine a site that holds all your small business management applications. You’d be happy, right?!   The price? It’s basically free.  As a bonus, it even lets you network with ‘00s of other Small to Medium-sized business (SMB) manager. Who needs lunch with that?

May I introduce the SohoOS management services environment where small and micro-business can prosper through use of integrated and simplified management functions.

2 weeks ago, SohoOS announced a new partner, Plimus ~ an e-Commerce platform and Buy Anyware API, to support SohoOS.

Plimus, the leader in hosted e-Business solutions, today announced that SohoOS standardized on Plimus as the e-Commerce platform for SohoOS’ cloud-based business management services. Plimus provides seamless integration into the SohoOS platform and handles all payment processing, billing and purchase support services. Subscriptions can be upgraded easily and administered by SohoOS as business users add additional low-cost, value-added services to its free, cloud-based core product eco-system. The Plimus Buy Anyware API also is employed to recognize returning business users and provides personalized purchasing features that enhance the customer experience.

SohoOS provides everything a micro-business or freelancer needs to run a successful business, all available with a single click and in one location. The service is free, with charges incurred only when using SohoOS’ extended low-cost services such as communication suite, marketing suite and more. SohoOS gives the small and micro-business community the ability to integrate as many applications and services as needed with a unified contact system, payment processing platform, social community, marketing tools and customized reports.

"Plimus was great to work with as a partner," said Ron Daniel, CEO of SohoOS. "They took the time to listen to our business needs and spent the time working with us to ensure we launched successfully. The Buy Anyware API was extremely easy to work with, response time is good and the solution for recurring charges it offered was exactly what we needed. We look forward to growing our business with Plimus as our partner"

Said Plimus Vice President of Marketing Charles Born: "There is no doubt SohoOS represents a most promising step forward in the development of cloud-based business management software. Their goal to facilitate a global shift in the business community – where chances of success for small and micro-businesses are equal to larger enterprise companies – is very synergistic to our business objectives for facilitating e-Commerce in the small- and medium-sized business market. We are proud to be able to offer billing for Cloud/SaaS services to SohoOS and other exciting companies operating in the cloud, as they increasingly turn to Plimus for mission-critical, flexible solutions."

About SohoOS

Freelancers and micro business owners live in a corporate dominated world and are faced with an impossible task. To compete on a day-to-day basis with big enterprises equipped with the most expensive management solutions and web based services. SohoOS’s mission is to revolutionize the way small and micro businesses interact and offer them a platform that will help them run smoothly without interference, all the while giving them a corporate edge in a nurturing environment, bundled in a simple to use, friendly and free solution. Our goal is to facilitate a global shift in the business community, where chances of success are equal to all. SohoOS is an Israel-based company with a New York City presence.

Cloud-based Service Overview SohoOS

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.