A New Zealand mobile developer claims it is the first company in the world to lanch a recordable video application that integrates fully with any customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Suitebox CEO Richard Mannell says the immediate business benefit is that staff can video call clients, interact and record some or all of the conversation and then store the footage directly in their CRM systems.
Whether discussing legal documents, building projects, annual insurance reviews, sale and purchase agreements or interviewing candidates for a new job, Suitebox allows users to record the content and save it as a file within the company CRM system for easy retrieval and sharing, he says.
“Video calling is fast becoming a standard tool in the business arsenal but until now such calls were conducted using third-party applications that offer variable video quality and don’t integrate well in the business context.
“We wanted to build a product that would enable business users to make video calls from their device but link it to the corporate environment. Increasingly, companies are being asked to store such communications as part of good corporate governance, for audit and control purposes or for collaboration. With Suitebox, they can do just that within their familiar CRM systems.
“We have a patent pending for this aspect of the Suitebox technology. It’s a key component of our service and something that nobody else offers.”
Suitebox is currently integrated with Auckland-based CRM Exsalerate and is now working with a number of the most popular global CRM systems, including Sales Force, Zoho and Oracle.
“We looked at the top 40 CRM systems to see which ones enable video calling from within their product set and not one includes video natively. To us, that was such an oversight and an obvious niche, so we designed Suitebox to work agnostically with any CRM system,” says Mannell.
He says Suitebox was originally targeting the insurance industry but knew it had to have an early cashflow application. “We will circle back to insurance.”
The company is in discussions with the Department of Housing to build an application which will look after its stock.
Aspirona provides the back end for Suitebox, which uses an Oracle database and middleware tier. Mannell says the company will adopt a two-tier charging structure: for storage, then for video streaming.
It is seeking an Australian patent.”We've been advised that this will fast-track us into the US, with which they have an arrangement.