UpShot Gets Personal

UpShot has announced new functionality for its CRM offering that allows businesses to customize all its sales processes and allows sales representatives to personalize their screens. Introduced at the DEMO 2003 conference, in Scottsdale, AZ, the functionality called MultiProcess Management lets individual UpShot XE users create a view that suits them using a drag-and-drop configuration tool. "Customization was the last advantage of client/server CRM systems," Keith Raffel, chairman and founder of UpShot, says. "We adapt so that customers adopt. MultiProcess Management enables our customers to tailor UpShot to their needs in a matter of minutes or hours, instead of the months it would take a team of Siebel consultants. We have eliminated the last reason to look at an expensive client/server system such as Siebel." Kathy Fiore, CIO for Accuweather, one of the largest providers of weather and traffic information across the United States, says that Upshot's new functionality allows the company to move quickly, lower its total cost-of-ownership, and rapidly respond to market changes. "Right now in this fiscally conservative climate all CIOs and IT managers have a mandate to do more with less, and that puts us in a quandary," Fiore says. "But MultiProcess Management lets us respond quickly to the changing market with new lines of business and processes that salespeople will actually use." UpShot's MultiProcess Management delivers multiple user-driven views, process management, and a workflow engine. "The workflow engine allows us to make sure that certain things happen--it's a good systems of checks and balances," Fiore says. Fiore says that multiple views enable different groups to consolidate information into one centralized system without having to sacrifice each group's unique needs. Individual users can use a drag-and-drop interface to design how they want view, create, and update information. Companies can designate which users or groups of users have access to a view. In addition an automated sales process workflow can route new leads to the qualification team, assign qualified opportunities to the appropriate sales group, create follow-up activities, and send notifications to alert the appropriate people when immediate attention is required. Businesses can also use MultiProcess Management to roll out new sales processes based on evolving best practices. UpShot officials claim that by making it easy for users to support these processes, companies can dramatically speed up user adoption, shorten sales cycles, and improve sales productivity by 20 percent or more.