Traditional customer relationship management or "CRM" solutions are good at tracking the sales funnel and customer support tickets, but they are poor at generating deeper customer engagement and information exchange that is so essential to complex sales, according to industry experts.  Most communications still take place through traditional channels such as email and telephone, with little context or permanent record.

 

To fill this gap, PBworks, a provider of hosted collaboration solutions for business and education, announced the launch of PBworks Customer Relationship Edition for collaborative CRM.

 

The new edition extends CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com (News - Alert) by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle, the company said.

 

In the words of PBworks CEO Jim Groff, "traditional CRM systems treat a customer as just a few rows in a database." "With our Customer Relationship Edition, businesses treat their customers like partners and can communicate and collaborate much more closely with them," Groff said.

 

PBworks Customer Relationship Edition provides a persistent, shared environment that companies can use with their customer throughout the relationship lifecycle, from prospecting and sales to ongoing account management and support, the company said. This will enable businesses to build a stronger relationship with customers and increase conversion, satisfaction, and retention.

 

'The big difference between what PBworks is doing and standard CRM is that PBworks is interactive for the customer,' David Coleman, founder and managing director of Collaborative Strategies, said.  'The customer interaction is where the rubber hits the road.  The problem with regular CRM is that the rubber never sees the road.'

 

PBworks Customer Relationship Edition enables businesses to collaboratively author important content such as proposals and agreements; share key documents and files such as contracts and collateral; set meeting agenda, take real-time notes, and capture and assign action items; manage critical processes like RFPs with project management tools; communicate in real-time with built-in chat, instant messaging, and teleconferencing; and track customer interactions to better evaluate engagement and interests.

 

PBworks Customer Relationship Edition includes all of the functionality in the company's flagship Business Edition, such as unlimited storage for documents and files, full-text search of document content, Mobile Edition access via BlackBerry (News - Alert) and iPhone, and 24/7 customer service.  

 

The new product also includes a shared collateral library for publishing important marketing pieces and documents to all prospects and customers, as well as advanced activity tracking to let sales and support representatives judge customer/prospect engagement levels and see which documents are being viewed.  

 

PBworks Customer Relationship Edition will be available in Q3 2010 at a starting price of $30/user/month, the company announced.  Unlimited customer/prospect workspaces and licenses are included at no additional cost.

 

Last fall the company had announced the Social Collaboration Update for PBworks Project Edition and Legal Edition, which integrates social media-style user profiles and micro-blogging functions, TMCnet reported.