Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Stop Tumbling Down the Sales Pipeline with Base

September 18, 2013

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the sales and customer service space. But, what exactly does CRM mean, or, better yet, what should it mean? A concept as ambiguous as relationship management does technology providers no favors when it comes to designing and developing useful solutions for businesses. When it comes to CRM, there really is no demarcation line – it’s basically managing everything that a business does with its customers; every touch-point falls within its scope.


One company trying the crack this quandary is Base. Founded in 2009, the company aims to help companies squeeze the most value out of CRM with as little effort as possible. Tal Tsfany, chief customer office at Base, told ContactCenterSolutions that the way to do this is by limiting the scope of CRM and focusing on getting things right in that particular aspect of customer management. Accordingly, Base has been focusing on sales pipeline management – the process of acquiring leads, importing leads and deals into the system, lead conversions, deal lifecycle management, and all the communication channels surrounding it.

“It’s really a daily battle to define the scope of CRM and where we can bring the most value,” he said. “Right now, our tendency is to invest more in existing experiences around the sales scope. We want to get things right and be excellent at what we do.”

Instead of expanding the scope to include more and more processes, like support or account management, Base looks first to make existing experience more meaningful, deeper and simpler. For example, with Base CRM, all the e-mails sent by a customer to a rep and a rep to a customer, all the calls they’ve made, any notes taken, etc., are all stored in the correct context as a conversation between the two parties on the platform. Agents can simply drag and drop documents like proposal or quotes for automatic archiving, creating a complete and accurate history of customer-rep interaction along the sales pipeline, all located in one, easy-to-access place.

What’s more, Base CRM seeks to redefine how companies manage their sales and support teams in a CRM context. Tsfany explained that its sales teams and region management capability enables users to visually organize teams and individuals, segmenting contacts, leads, deals and tasks between them. Displaying a graphical tree that reflects the hierarchical structure of the organization, managers can view and define permissions and access privileges with the click of a mouse.  

Base CRM has seen notable success in short-cycle, quick sales environments.  Its sales and CRM application is the No. 1 downloaded CRM application in all app stores, underscoring the platforms streamlined competency across mobile devices. The company decided early on to invest in being native across all mobile platforms, Tsfany said. This, combined with its ability to simplify complex activity, like document and user-permission management, is why customers are choosing Base.   

Base has grown from serving exclusively small to medium-sized business to now tapping into the enterprise market. The company recently released its enterprise plan and hopes to sustain its current exponential growth while staying true to the underlying premises they started with – complex tasks don’t have to be complicated.

“Our philosophy,” Tasfany said, “is if you focus on the user, their experience and the way they interact with their tools and applications, you end up with better software.”




Edited by Rachel Ramsey



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