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Insightly, a young CRM (customer relationship management) cloud service that has the gumption to compete directly against much larger and established companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Adobe, released a new version of its product April 12–about a month after the previous iteration.
This one is aimed at new-gen enterprises whose businesses require greater flexibility in how they structure and access their customer data.
Many new options and the instant-access nature of online environments have empowered customers to constantly explore alternatives. In order to satisfy these expectations and retain customers, each CRM deployer now must provide its customer a data store with a 360-degree view, Insightly said, so that any question can be answered–or problem solved–promptly.
Key Functionality
The latest version of Insightly, available starting April 12 for customers across all paid plans, offers the following capabilities:
- Data Capture: Five new custom fields give more flexibility over the data users capture and store in Insightly, including a relationship-lookup field which allows users to link any object with another, allowing deeper reporting on connections between contacts, organizations and other records.
- Data Display: Dynamic page layout editor gives total control of virtually every screen within Insightly on a user, team or department basis; the editor applies business and display rules using a custom-built composition engine to generate screens dynamically in less than 80 milliseconds.
- Data Validation: Drag-and-drop editor allows users to configure every part of each page by adding, editing and removing different sections of each page, including individual fields and the order in which they appear; this helps ensure data validation and integrity to show only the information users must fill out or need to access based on their role.
- Mobile: Insightly’s fully customizable mobile CRM allows users to access critical customer and business data such as leads, contacts, projects and reports however and wherever they go, with a consistent experience to their tailored desktop environment.
“The team has been working on this new version for about a year. It really involves the ability to customize the screen and the look of Insightly for anybody in the organization,” CEO and founder Anthony Smith of the 9-year-old, San Francisco-based company told eWEEK. “Our customers really wanted different departments and organizational units within the company to be able to see different parts of a record on the screen at the same time.
“A good example of this is in the solar (power) market. We have some companies that install solar panels on people’s roofs in sunny Southern California, and the billing team at those companies needed to see certain fields about whether the customer has paid for a job. But the guys who are out in the field doing the installation need to see a different bunch of information on their cellphones, involving the square footage and the different metrics around the types of inverters they need to use.”
This new version of Insightly allows users to structure the way the page looks and add the different inputs and business rules around the data, based on who you are within the organization, Smith said.
“Only three other CRMs around the world have these features, and no one at our price point does,” Smith said.
Enterprise-Grade Business Intelligence for CRM
Last month, Insightly added integrated, enterprise-grade data visualization dashboards that allow companies to uncover new insights about their business, track important projects and share information. Using data drawn from Insightly’s Customer Relationship Platform, users can customize dashboards and tailor the underlying CRM data to meet their specific business requirements.
Insightly CRM has been purposely built using a metadata-driven architecture, which allows for the dynamic rendering of the CRM’s user interface, in accordance to the specific requirements of each individual user.
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