Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

 

New Zealand software company, On2it Software, has released to the CRM world what company officials are calling "a completely new class of computer application" - a "Network Relationship Management" system, with a free personal version available to all.

 

CEO Brian McGuigan calls the product, RelationshipGEM, "the next generation of contact management systems designed to manage the relationships between everyone in an entire network of contacts without duplication of information."

 

It's On2it's position that contact management systems are playing an increasingly significant role in maintaining and developing business relationships. To remain competitive in domestic and international markets, company officials say, businesses "have come to realize that strong relationships, be it with customers, suppliers, advisors or any type of business associate, are essential assets in themselves."

 

The underlying philosophy behind CRM systems has what On2it officials see as "a fundamental logic flaw that no CRM system is able to overcome -- they focus entirely on the customer. So all other relationships critical to a business are, by definition, ignored."

 

Early contact management systems created in the 1980s were "nothing more than a computerized version of the ‘little black address book,'" company officials say, adding that in the 1990s software development companies began to create "what are now known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems."

 

The philosophy behind CRM systems is focused customer relationships, On2it officials say: "All CRM systems are directed toward understanding and determining what current and future customers need and designing a business strategy around those needs."

 

Development of RelationshipGEM began in 2002 as an in-house software project, when On2it Software "identified the need to manage its own contact information and sought out a flexible, cost effective CRM system," company officials say, adding that "frustrated at being unable to find a product with a realistic underlying data model, the decision was made to do it ourselves."

 

The product manages all relationships, not just customers, in one single database and records all the relationships between everyone and everything in the system. It's designed to create a single consolidated history of all communications including e-mails, faxes, letters, phones calls, meetings, and there is no duplication of data. "If something exists in the real world only once, then RelationshipGEM will only record it once -- even phone numbers. Its effectiveness lies in its ability to remember who else shares the same information."

 

Finding a contact is also easy, McGuigan says, as any scrap of recalled information will be sufficient for RelationshipGEM to find all the recorded information about them -- even if that scrap is their relationship with someone else: "This almost intuitive behavior is unheard of in any computer system. People will have to try it just to believe it's possible."

 

The product runs on all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista. It also works with all versions of Microsoft Office up to and including Office 2007.