PBworks, which offers collaborative tools for businesses, announced today that it's releasing a new edition of its toolset for companies that want a more collaborative way to work with their customers.
It's called PBworks' Customer Relationship Edition. Vice President of Marketing Chris Yeh acknowledged that customer relationship management (CRM) is a long-established software category, but he said PBworks is doing something different. Existing CRM tools offered by companies like Salesforce.com are really built for the salesperson or sales team, and help them track contact information and sales leads. So CRM is only minimally involved in the actual process of working with a customer.
That's where PBworks comes in. Since the San Mateo, Calif. company's application can be used to work with clients outside the company, Yeh said a number of businesses were already using PBworks as a way to collaborate with their customers. The new version adds features to the basic toolset to make that collaboration easier.
The biggest addition may be the ability to monitor customer activity in a workspace, for example keeping track of whenever customers log into the site or download a file. Other features make it easier to work with many customers at once, by automating the creation of new customer workspaces with a few customized fields, and by sharing documents from a single repository, so that if you update a document the changes are reflected across all your workspaces. (Yeh noted this would have been useful when PBworks changed its name from PBwiki, forcing it to adjust all its company presentations and other materials.) Some additions are basically tweaks, like the ability to customize a PBworks website with your company logo.
PBworks will also integrate with existing CRM tools, starting with Salesforce.com, so users can create a customer workspace directly from Salesforce, using the data in that account.
Here's an example provided by PBworks of how CBE Technologies uses Customer Relationship Edition:
We start the customer collaboration process during the presales phase, once we feel there's a greater than 75% chance the deal will close. We place PDFs of the statement of work on each client workspace, allowing a clean transition from sales to operations. Once a project is complete, we transition the workspace over to the support staff. With PBworks, everyone on the team has access and can present a unified front to the client. It's had a major impact on productivity and customer satisfaction.
PBworks plans to release the new features in the third quarter of this year and to charge $30 per user per month for them (compared to the standard edition, which costs $20 per user per month). Customers won't be included in the user count.