Upswing CRM has announced a "Spring Awakening '08" promotion for the forthcoming release of Upswing CRM for Wealth Management. The new release, "with its Web 2.0 orientation," will launch in the next few weeks, the Upswingers say.
The Spring Awakening promotion, "with its themes of bloom, growth, beauty, and the waking up to a new era of CRM" -- First Coffee's reading off the cue cards, folks -- reflects "the visual and functional design elegance along with a blossoming of new features in the new version of Upswing CRM."
Dan Ferranti, Vice President of Technology at Upswing CRM, said based on the responses from private demos of the beta version, the company is "confident that the new release of Upswing CRM will be well received by the financial advisor community."
The announcement was made recently at the kickoff of "Technology Tools for Today" in Orlando, a conference for technology for independent financial advisors.
They certainly do like their promo campaigns over there: In addition to the Spring Awakening product announcement, Upswing CRM has launched a longer-term advertising campaign called "The End of CRM Complexity."
And they're not aiming low, either: "With our new release, we'll be inviting anyone who has experienced the forced labor of too many CRM keystrokes and clicks or squinted at the visual clutter of CRM systems from Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Oracle's Siebel and Sage's ACT to contact us to experience Upswing's intuitively designed and functionally efficient CRM service," said John Rourke, CEO of Upswing CRM. "We will compete aggressively with bloated, first generation on-demand CRM systems that are complex to work with and depressing to look at."
Yeah! You go, gi… uh, right.
Research cited by Upswing indicates a "significant number" of CRM implementations fail, in large part due to "low adoption rates among business professionals who find the CRM systems difficult to master." Upswing's view is that CRM should be simple, intuitive, provide relevant features in a Web 2.0 orientation, and not force high-powered sales and business development professionals to view ugly interfaces and learn cryptic functionality.
"Ugly." When's the last time you heard CRM criticized for being "ugly?" But the man has a point.
"We're grateful to Salesforce.com in helping pave the software-as-a-service road upon which we travel," said John Rourke, CEO of Upswing CRM. "But the irony is that in customer relationship management, the older on-demand vendors have not treated their own customers well in providing clunky, dated interface designs and inefficient workflows for CRM. Some of these older web-based CRM offerings were seemingly created by a committee of database technicians with no product designers or users in the room."
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David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist pageMark your calendars! Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO — the first major IP
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