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81,000+ HTML Mass Mailing
One of our valued customers has utilized Revolution CRM to successfully launch an HTML Mass Mailing campaign reaching over 81,000 of their customers worldwide! Each individual email message, utilizing contact-specific information and making each email appear as a personal vendor-to-customer correspondence - all accomplished utilizing the out-of-the-box functionality of the Revolution!
Skype | Revolution CRM Integration
Ensuring Revolution CRM remains a cutting edge solution, the current release our Revolution CRM is now fully integrated with Skype VOIP and P2P Chat.
Revolution CRM v1.0: Addresses
A spotlight view into Addresses: Revolution CRM's Contact Management Solution
Author: Derik Bracke
Affiliation: Clearframe, LLC (Principal)
Publish Date: Thursday, November 10th, 2005
While other vendors tend to offer often-expensive, "kitchen-sink" CRM application suites, Revolution CRM was initially designed to meet the very basic requirements for a typical organization; our architecture and concept teams wanted to keep things simple. Early in the development of this suite of Lotus Notes/Domino-based applications, we decided to take a very non-typical approach: allow the organization's CRM champion to drive how the application worked for their organization, and not dictate-via-code how an organization would use our CRM/SFA solutions.
While we do consider ourselves experts in the CRM-realm, we concede when it comes to knowing more about your organization!
We allow you, the CRM champion, to drive how the application works. The gravity of this statement tends to get lost, unless you've ever used a 3rd-party solution...
Most CRM decisions are made in-house to address a request from one or several different business units. These business units often have different requirements for data collection, different usage of the data that they collect, and an overall different understanding of just what CRM is and what it can do for them. While Marketing needs Vendor and Business Partner contact information, it's a rarity that they require Customer and Prospect contact information. It's an even further rarity that the information collected for Customers and Prospects will be the same information Marketing will want to track for their Vendors and Business Partners.
It's with this in mind, amongst other items that I'll address, that we set out to design Revolution CRM!
Our Push-button Integration initiative, which was originally designed to allow you to integrate with other 3rd-Party or in-house solutions, as by-product allows you to maintain multiple instances of a given offering.
Now, not only can your organization have an instance of Revolution CRM Addresses as their Master Directory, but your Marketing, your Sales, and your Customer Service business units can have their own fully functional instances of Addresses, configured to collect the information their business unit needs to function and configured to function per the business units individual needs.
We set off to design a solution that appeared to be a simple one - and in doing so, we designed one of the most detailed, functional, and configurable solutions on the market!
While we include a complete set of suggested / standard functions and operations for any given CRM solution, we allow your in-house IT/IS Departments (or those of you who are Lotus geeks in your own right) to build your own functions... as configuration. To facilitate the meeting of the needs/wants from any number of business units and VIPs, you can have your own custom functions configured into the system - allowing you to fully utilize your CRM solution! And in doing this via configuration, you greatly decrease the need for customization, additional consulting, and you ensure product warranty!
Now the simple approach didn't only stop at the functional design; it carried through to the flow and design of the application with results beyond our expectations.
A few key items that lend to this simple theme throughout the application suite are:
- Application-to-Application Navigation
- Form Layout and Design
- And, a personal favorite, the Toolbox!
In an effort to greatly lessen the adoption-times of our solutions, we have attempted to mirror the best features of the most common solutions available to the typical Lotus Notes user: their Mail file. One example of this would be our Application-to-Application Navigation.
At the top-left of each Revolution CRM application, you will find a common drop-down styled navigation system. This navigation system is a mirror of the Lotus Notes/Domino 6.x Mail Template's system for quick-access to Calendar, Tasks, and your Inbox. Using this drop-down (pictured left), the user can navigate between the various applications, and various instances of the applications, in the Revolution CRM suite.
As our Mail Template-inspired Application-to-Application Navigation method greatly reflected commonly used methods in the Lotus Notes/Domino environment, we designed our content forms to structure their data and layout via a method that is becoming a favorite for many web applications (and web application users) on the World Wide Web today - Revolution CRM's Vertical Tabbed Navigation!
Again, SIMPLE. In usability testing, we've found that the users eyes are instantly drawn to the important areas on the screen. In each content form, we have attempted to include as much information in a single area wherein 1) it makes sense to group like-fields and 2) the user would expect to see the information displayed!
We have also found, in usibility tests, that users tend to rely on a single launchpad for their daily functions. With this in mind, we designed into each Revolution CRM application a common My Toolbox.
This drag-N-drop functional area, found in each Revolution CRM application, allows the user to maintain their own often-accessed links to items within the Revolution CRM suite (Contact/Organization documents, Documents/Books in Bookshelf, Revolution CRM's Document Management solution, etc.).
This collaspable area can additionally house often-accessed programs, websites, and even documents from network shares or from the user's hard drive by simply dragging-and-dropping! Prominetly displayed about the My Toolbox header, you will also see the Revoltion CRM's quicksearch function - again employing comptemporary World Wide Web design standards, your users can find the information that they need - available at their fingertips within seconds!
The last item I would like to cover in this indepth review of the basic SIMPLE approach is, despite all of the bleeding edge functions and industry-tested solutions found within the design of this application, we have taken great care to ensure that the applications are trim, fit, and allow for complete function at WAN-speeds that rival local hard-drive access of other Lotus Notes-based CRM solutions. In doing so, we have been able to deliver all of this functionality in a very small package.
Below, you will see a screen-capture of Clearframe's live Revolution CRM environment, via the Database Properties dialog box:
Despite it's large featureset, over 65 contacts, 43 companies, and 15 HTML-based Mass Mailing/Mail Merging Templates, Revoltuion CRM's Addresses is currently well under 4MB in total size!