Serious Games For Customer Relationship Management

by on 23 May, 2007 - 00:39

Via: The New York Times - Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video GameBy MICHAEL FITZGERALDPublished: May 20, 2007Rave is the newest member of Entellium's family of powerful software for customer relationship management. Designed specifically for small companies with up to 10 sales professionals, Rave offers a sleek, intuitive user interface and lets you work with customer data at any time, even when you are not connected to the Internet.

Serious Games helping spend time on the deals you’re most likely to close

Paul Johnston, president and chief executive of Entellium, has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game.

Paul Johnston, chief of Entellium, which makes business software based on video-game techniques

Businesses spend billions of dollars on such software to try to track their sales staff, their marketers, their customer service — anything that connects them with customers. C.R.M. software is designed to let your manager peek at you,” Mr. Johnston says. He notes that even at Entellium, based in Seattle, he has had trouble getting his sales staff to update their data consistently. Reasoning that sales people are wildly competitive, he thought that they would respond to a program that showed where they stood against their goals — or their peers’.Hence, Rave, which Entellium introduced in April.Rave adapts a variety of gaming techniques. For instance, you can build a dossier of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, much like the character descriptions in many video games. Prospects are given ratings, not by how new they are — common in C.R.M. programs — but by how likely they are to buy something.

 What makes Rave CRM shine is its amazing interface.At $400 per year, you might blink before buying this product, but if SALES is your blood stream, I would highly suggest you at least check it out and try a demo.It's a hot product in that it has full online and offline availability, with instant page uploads and navigation because data is stored locally and online. This feature is a VERY POWERFUL one!Built in RSS feeds and advanced automation, combined with the slick interface make this product more than software as usual.Entellium sought feedback from hundreds of salespeople around the globe. The company asked these individuals what they liked and did not like about sales management products they had used in the past, including PC-based contact managers as well as CRM solutions from a wide variety of vendors, including enterprise and hosted applications. In addition, each was asked to describe his or her ideal solution for sales productivity.Rave CRM is a complete sales productivity solution that features a rich, visually immersive user interface powered by Sparkle, Entellium's breakthrough UI platform. Rave’s visual interface is a significant departure from today’s limiting tab-based structure, replacing traditional tabs with a sleek, icon-driven layout.Rave incorporates features popularized in popular Internet applications, such as its exclusive zoom in-zoom out timeline views, the ability to "drag and drop" to create sales activities and palettes that float around the screen to display information where it is preferred. These features are wrapped in an application that sits on a PC but taps into the power of an on-demand data center for high performance access anytime and anywhere.Rave CRM has many of the common features found in any decent CRM and sales application, but it also has man more features such as:

Star Rankings. Users have an at-a-glance view into the contacts, prospects and deals that are most important. Rave examines a number of details about each record (the size of the deal, projected close date, the importance of each contact, and so on), then uses an advanced algorithm to calculate a star ranking for each. The choice of who to call each day becomes much clearer, resulting more effective selling and time management.There's more features. You've got to at least check it out!

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