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ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE REPORT

New CRM Offerings Up the Social Media Ante

Nimble has introduced a new Software as a Service social CRM platform designed to enable social engagement. Nimble 2.0 empowers companies to get closer to their customers through listening and engagement, helping them turn their social communities into customers for life, according to the company. Features include social discovery, improved usability and marketing integration.

“Most people simply don’t use their CRM systems,” Jon Ferrara, Nimble CEO and founder of GoldMine, a pioneering CRM product, told CRM Buyer. “They’re just dead databases they type into, and most people that do that aren’t database professionals. Nimble goes to the heart of the issue and provides a platform for individuals and teams to build relationships through engagement.”

While social media is often “bolted onto” legacy platforms, “you still have to warp out your CRM application to actually engage with those people,” he added. “What CRM should be doing is tying everything together and bringing in what people are saying and their activities, and connect them for you and your team. What we’re doing with this service is fixing the ‘R’ in CRM.”

Social Engagement

Key social engagement features include support for Facebook business pages and Google+ support that enables companies to listen and engage their customers while tracking and capturing real-time data when fans interact on social streams.

Nimble’s unified social notifications capability consolidates all the likes, comments, friend invites and other social interactions from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ so that users don’t have to go to five separate tabs to engage with their customers and prospects. These new features are combined with alerts on birthdays, promotions and job changes in a daily email notification.

The Nimble contact record pulls together all related messages, activities, and deals, and includes the contact’s live social stream.

Nimble also features integration with HubSpot to enable closed-loop marketing.

Nimble is free for standalone personal users. Business and multi-users can sign up for Nimble at US$15 per user per month.

New Subscription Commerce Platform

OneBill Software announced the general availability of the OneBill Subscription Commerce Platform, v2.1 at the CloudConnect Computing Conference and Expo. The new release unleashes the revenue potential of social commerce through integration with social networking sites, the company said.

OneBill Subscription Commerce Platform is an integrated solution to manage a subscription services company’s core business functions by connecting internal marketing, sales, operations and technology departments to the provider’s external customers, influencers and prospects. This latest enhancement delivers product management, order management, customer management and revenue management functionalities with the goal of monetizing subscription-based cloud business quickly and efficiently.

Zoho Announces First User Conference

Zoho has announced the first Zoholics 2012 user conference. The day-long event will be held March 26, 2012, at the Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront. The conference was established to help Zoho customers get more out of Zoho applications in order to improve their overall productivity, communication and collaboration. Attendees will have a chance to engage in intense product and industry trend sessions, and learn best practices from Zoho experts and other Zoho users

The fee is $79 per attendee for those who register before Feb. 26, and $159 for those who register later.

New Information Resources

Allegiance, a provider of VOCi (Voice of Customer Intelligence) technology and services, is presenting a complimentary webinar, “The Customer Cascade: How Customer Feedback Drives Experience Design & Business Outcomes,” on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012, at 11 a.m. MST. Presenters include Kerry Bodine, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, and Andrew McInnes, director of product marketing at Allegiance.

The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) has added a new webinar to its educational series entitled “Blending Operational and Customer Metrics.” Presenters included Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group and Ian Golding, former head of group customer experience at Shop Direct Group.

Denise J. Deveau is a seasoned freelance writer based in Toronto, Ontario. She has more than two decades of experience in business- and technology-related subjects.

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