BT's drive to create a 'one stop shop' Cloud practice has been fleshed out further with the delivery of Ribbit for Salesforce, enabling customers of the SaaS CRM offering to link their accounts to mobile voice communications.
Ribbit for Salesforce can store and organise voicemail as email in Salesforce CRM, categorising leads, contacts and in progress deals. All voice messages are also delivered as SMS or email so that users can respond or forward to others in their organisation without having to dial into voicemail. The offering is already available in the US but is the first UK service from the Ribbit Communications Platform since BT acquired the Silicon Valley start-up last year. “It was a significant acquisition,” said Chris Lindsay, general manager BT Business applications. “About 6 months in, we are able to bring the benefit of that acquisition to market and show what we're going to be able to do with it.”
Lindsay argues that mobile technology such as Ribbit can be a powerful enabler for growth in a troubled economy, particularly for mid-sized companies. “There's a big problem for SMEs that they haven't been able to address around the mobility and productivity of their mobile workforces,” he said. “It's a problem for them primarily because it's difficult for them to do right now. It's difficult to take an existing app and mobilise it. The processes break down. In current climate, productivity is key to how businesses can survive. Survival is the key word this year. Some 20% of SMEs are looking to take mobile technology into their workforce, full scale productivity suites and applications.”
So what is Ribbit? And how does it fit with Salesforce.com? “Ribbit is primarily a productivity tool for field sales people,” explained Lindsay. “There is a part of any CRM programme which is about adoption. It's easier to get adoption if your CRM is in the office. You may still have to use carrot and stick but you can drive adoption quicker. For field sales people on the road, they want to be out there selling and visiting customers. They don't want to come home at night and log on to their CRM system and input all their data about meetings. So they allocate a time on Friday to do it, but by that time they have forgotten what they did on Monday. There is a briefcase time – the time when information is locked away in a briefcase or in the salesperson's head. During that time, it's not available to the rest of the organisation.
“Ribbit enables them to ring themselves up and leave themselves a message about the meeting they've just had. That gets entered into Salesforce.com and translated into text. Salesperson has captured information at a time when it's still fresh in his head. It's automatically tagged and routed into the system and others can use it. The transcription is also delivered as text to his Blackberry or other mobile device. By the time he gets to next appointment, he's done the donkey work that he didn't used to have time to do.”
Ribbit for Salesforce is delivered as a Cloud Computing service so from the point of view of cost-sensitive SMEs it can be implemented quickly without infrastructure or management overhead costs of traditional on premise applications. “From a BT perspective, this is a good example of how we bring together aspects of The Cloud,” said Lindsay. “We are the only place where a customer can come and get services end to end. We are in a position to offer a one stop shop to bring it all together.”
Free mobile CRM
Meanwhile Salesforce.com has launched its own mobile gambit by rolling out Mobile Lite, a free offering that gives its customers access to Salesforce CRM on their iPhone, Blackberry, or Microsoft Windows Mobile-equipped handsets. With Mobile Lite, customers will have access to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud; they will be able to log calls and emails, update activities and tasks, view account and contact details, and access their dashboard.
The offering is a result of the acquisition of Sendia by Salesforce.com. Mobile Lite – as the name suggests – is not a full-blooded version of the Salesforce.com CRM offering. For example, the interface lacks custom objects and certain search and edit options. It's not available on the Google Android mobile devices as yet, despite Salesforce.com's much proclaimed closeness to Google.
Mobile Lite will be available to customers who have either Salesforce CRM Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition. Those with the Professional or Enterprise Editions will be able to upgrade to the full mobile version of CRM for an additional fee per user per month, while Unlimited Edition customers can access the full mobile version at no extra cost.
“We want even more customers to experience the success possible with mobile access to our Cloud,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. “We want our customers to take The Cloud with them, wherever they go. By delivering mobile access to our Cloud, for free, we’re accelerating adoption of the Cloud and delivering value to customers in times when they need it the most.”