In addition to offering a good product, the other important thing any company can do to increase revenue is to make sure they are reaching potential customers. A CRM (customer relationship management) application is of paramount importance in helping your sales force surf an ocean of contacts and sales leads and ultimately boost your revenue.
The problem is that the complexity involved in installing and keeping a sales force automation product humming can drain your budget, try your patience, and disgust the very people that should benefit from it: your salespeople.
Enter the world of affordable, ubiquitous, reliable, and quickly delivered CRM offered as a service. UpShot ESP (Extended Service Plan) is a service and set of applications that you can put to work at a fraction of the time and cost required to purchase and install a comparable package, let alone maintenance.
We found the new UpShot ESP to be a flexible, easy-to-use, Web-delivered CRM solution that covers the whole spectrum of the sales process, from contact management to marketing campaigns. Furthermore UpShot promises a quick and budget-friendly deployment as well as an unprecedented commitment to service excellence -- all at a price that should cause concern for Siebel and SalesLogix.
With its service commitments, UpShot may have created a precedent that competitors will be forced to follow. Our overall assessment of UpShot ESP is Very Good. We did not give it a score of Excellent because we felt its applications portfolio was limited to CRM-only tasks, as opposed to solutions from Oracle or SAP that include the capability to tie in e-commerce and e-procurement -- and we felt the SLA (service-level agreement) could be refined.
Generating sales
UpShot offers a flexible CRM solution that you can easily customize to satisfy the sales automation needs of your company. For example, you can easily define sales territories, allocate groups of users, and granularly assign roles -- and therefore the ability to access certain information -- to each group-member.
UpShot allows you to manage contacts, deals, and customers; to define and execute promotional campaigns; and to monitor the performance of sales teams via the multiple built-in reports and charts. In addition to standard reporting, UpShot offers easy creation of custom reports.
More impressive is UpShot's graphic metaphor, one of the most captivating on the market, which enables you to visualize sales forecasts. Appropriately named "Radar," this feature offers an immediate summary based on the actual deal database. Using a wizard, managers can select which sales event to monitor and drill down to details.
Furthermore, the flexibility of the interface is one of the strong points of UpShot. One interesting option allows users to link the content of a field on the workspace to a URL on the Web.
Backed by bucks
UpShot ESP gets as close as possible to the target of perfection by offering assistance to implement the system, promising deployment within 15 business days, and after that, 99.9 percent, around-the-clock system availability.
Most notably, UpShot backs up that pledge with clearly defined penalties listed in a comprehensive SLA. For example, for companies that have a sales team consisting of up to 50 people, UpShot will deploy the service in 15 business days. During that time, UpShot will assign a project manager to coordinate your implementation; configure the system according to your sales process; migrate your existing Account, Deal, and Contact databases; and provide training for your users and administrators.
If not completed on time, UpShot promises a 5 percent discount on the $5,000 implementation fee for each day late. Also, if they don't meet their 99.9 percent uptime promise, you get a 10 percent discount for each hour of downtime. Although the financial impact on your company will probably exceed that discount, it is certainly a laudable level of commitment we hope other vendors will follow.
However, there were other parts of the SLA we found unacceptable. Specifically, the promised response time of 15 days for "serious" problems should be revised. Waiting more than two weeks could spell disaster for your company if serious data corruption occurs.
UpShot offers an easy-to-use Web-based CRM service. The only drawback is that it is limited to little more than CRM applications. Companies that have a larger appetite may be enticed by competitors such as Oracle Corp., J.D. Edwards & Co., or SAP AG, which offer a full range of hosting services such as CRM, ERP (enterprise resource planning), e-business, and e-procurement.
Because of the specific functionality of the product, the easy delivery via the Internet, and the excellent commitment from the vendor, we found UpShot ESP to be one of the most interesting CRM offerings to date. The product is simple to use, can be enriched with add-ons from third-party vendors, is flexible, and has powerful CRM functionality. We considered these factors more than enough reason to acknowledge UpShot ESP's excellency, although we tempered its score to Very Good because of the more comprehensive alternatives offered by competitors.
Mario Apicella, a technology analyst for the InfoWorld Test Center, is a former programmer and database administrator. E-mail mario_apicella@infoworld.com.
UpShot ESP: More than just a CRM applicationUpShot offers top-notch support and services to make sure they are doing everything they can to help you increase your number and quality of sales leads.
Rapid implementation: Deployment time: 15 business days, with penalties for each day of delayUpShot project manager: UpShot will provide a project manager to monitor each implementationConfiguration and data import: Customer-specific data import and sales-process customizationAdministrator and user training: Web-based training for administrators and users, tailored to your company's implementationTraining materials: Customized Web-based training materials to help for future training needsSupport: Around-the-clock access to support service, with ESP problem resolution taking priority over othersService-level agreement: 99.9 percent uptime, guaranteed by penalties for lesser performanceMonthly data delivery: UpShot provides a copy of customer data on CD-ROM each monthTHE BOTTOM LINE: VERY GOODUpShot ESPBusiness Case: The UpShot CRM service will help you achieve service excellence, leading to increased peace of mind for you and your customers. It comes guaranteed with a pioneering SLA backed by cash rebates for underperformance.
Technology Case: The browser-contained client of UpShot dramatically simplifies the client-technical landscape. The service can be integrated with third-party add-ons for features such as synchronization with handheld devices and offline reports printing.
Pros:
+ Web-delivered, browser-based, flexible CRM applications+ SLA guarantees installation and application availability+ Cost of the service competitive with in-house deploymentCons:
- Does not offer a path for integration with additional services including e-commerce and e-procurement- Some support issues should be refinedCost: $80 per user, per month; $5,000 implementation fee requires one-year commitmentQuality of Support: During our test, we had no service-related problems. A good ISP is essential.
Platform(s): Internet Explorer or Netscape browserUpShot.com, Mountain View, Calif.; (888) 700-8774; www.upshot.com