The Relenta blog

Here are our software design mantras that make Relenta what it is, nothing else and nothing less.

Simple is more, not less

We believe that the term “simple software” is popularly misused. Designing simple apps isn’t easy, and simple doesn’t mean dumbed-down. For us, simplicity is synonymous with more ability. Simple is the software that lets you get more done with less effort.

Live and let work

We believe in not forcing you to work the way we think is right. Instead, we give you the tools and get out of your way. When faced with multiple design decisions, we apply the one that makes fewer assumptions about what is good for you.

The 90-10 rule

We believe that less is more. Our goal is the software that gives you 90 per cent of the functionality that most small businesses need with only 10 per cent of the application weight. Why not the familiar 80-20 rule? Because we can do better than that.

The one-click zone

We believe that the #1 reason for poor productivity is data fragmentation across multiple apps, accounts and browser windows. Our goal is to organize any and all information required for running your daily life so that nothing is more than one click away.

Similarities, not differences

We believe that at their core, all small work groups share similar challenges. For this reason we are focusing on the similarities among our users and not on what makes them different. We build our software to be universally applicable to work groups in any trade or profession.

Amen.

Did you know that you can search Google with an image instead of text? I’ve uploaded my general-purpose avatar and voilà — this blog, my LinkedIn profile and some other pages come up in the results. Cool. But the real riot is “Visually similar images” collection at the bottom. Here it is:

I’ll take it as a compliment and stop worrying about our own technology not being perfect all the time.

Chris Bucholtz makes a few excellent points about various social CRM faux pas in a recent CRM Buyer article:

The worst thing you can do is engage in a dialog, but then leave the customer hanging as you try to iron out your internal processes. It’s better not to engage than it is to engage in a way that deepens the customer’s irritation.

Bucholtz warns against several specific scenarios that could screw things up for you. They likely would, unless you use the proper tools. I’ll use Relenta to illustrate the points (go figure):

…companies haven’t established the processes needed to transport customer questions from person to person.

Communication bits from social networks are synced into your unified inbox in Relenta. If team members who deal with it first aren’t in the position to take action immediately, then they can create a task, assign it to another person, and start an internal dialog using a built-in commenting system.

The risk [with paid-for support levels in a tech company] is that customers may figure out that they can short-circuit the process by purchasing lesser service packages and then skip around their limitations by going to a social media site.

Again, once the social media interaction is associated with a customer record in your CRM, anyone on your team can instantly see what level of support they’re entitled to. You can also decide on the spot if it would be beneficial to bend the rules if, for example, this person happens to be one of your best customer advocates.

Bucholtz warns against the danger of appearing unauthentic (methinks this warning is applicable to any CRM process, not just social CRM):

What you can’t get away with is a reliance on canned answers or automatically generated responses. While these may increase the productivity of your staff, they destroy the effectiveness of your CRM efforts.

Bring it on!

Being authentic takes a relaxed state of mind. With Relenta, you can get pending tasks, important facts and bits and pieces of conversations out of your head by pouring it all into a self-organizing system. This way your mind is freed from mindless work and can actually be mindful (and personable).

There are so many social media channels out there that it becomes very easy to allow all your resources to be absorbed in a grand effort to cover them all.

Once the relevant social dialogs are synced into your CRM — as they should be — they become no different from other action items that you are already working with day in, day out. And a large number of interactions with your customers and prospects is a good thing. If they want to talk to you or about you, it should be the case of the more, the merrier, right?

Lost for words

If a customer had had a bad experience with you, its negative impact may be worse than you think. Scientific American reports on the results of study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:

Researchers at New York University and Carnegie Mellon University conducted seven experiments to determine how people’s expectations shape their memories. In one test, they exposed 30 students to the noise of a vacuum cleaner for 40 seconds. Afterward, half were told they would have to hear the noise again, whereas the rest were told the study was over. Everyone was then asked to rate how irritated they were by the noise. Students who expected to hear it again consistently found it more irritating. Other tests involving stimuli that bored and annoyed subjects all yielded the same results.

Think about it.

Rinat Abdullin, technology leader at Lokad and co-founder of My Dream City, a social initiative that raises awareness about kids without parents

This is a guest post by Rinat Abdullin, technology leader at Lokad, a long-time customer and contributor of great ideas and inspiration. Lokad develops forecasting software and services that are delivered on pay-as-you-go basis. The company is a winner of the 2010 Windows Azure Partner Award by Microsoft.

A while ago I’ve mentioned My Dream City, a social project, which I’ve helped to start. In short, the project tries to raise social awareness about kids without parents and attract sponsors to the orphanages. A you would expect, even the smallest social project has to be involved in a lot of communications, including (but not limited to): direct email conversations with interested volunteers, outbound contacts, negotiations with other social organizations, follow-ups, activities in various social networks, etc.

While helping to establish core processes within the project, I’ve leveraged social communications experience of Lokad. Relenta, a simple web solution for managing emails and contacts, is used for both of these cases with great success.

The setup worked like this. We’ve established a single email address for the entire project (info@mydreamcity.org, which is hosted on Google Mail). This email address is actually the inbox for the Relenta. Every message that gets through, is automatically associated with a contact (if there is a matching one already) or you can create one. Since My Dream City, as a social project, had to deal with quite a few people and organizations, there were quite a few contacts, as you could imagine.

My Dream City tries to raise awareness about kids without parents and attract sponsors to the ophranages

Over the time, as the amount of inbound emails grew, answering them proved to be too time consuming for me. Besides, there had some follow-ups to be done along with contact initiations from our side. So I’ve just scaled out by adding a few volunteers as users to the same Relenta inbox. They were assigned responsibilities over managing contacts. Given the outlined process (explained in one or two wiki articles), it was easy for new users to log into Relenta and get started answering incoming emails and eventually doing more involved activities.

There were a couple of reasons for that:

• Whenever a new email from an existing contact comes, it is already associated with all the previous conversations. So it’s easy to continue from the point, where the conversation had previously stopped (even if the person to continue conversation is a different one).
• In case of doubt or a question, it is possible to look up how similar questions are handled for the other contacts by the other users; or just ask another more knowledgeable user to handle the reply.
• Whenever a user has to leave, his contacts can be reassigned to the other one transparently, without any interruption in the process.
• There is only a single contact email for the entire organization, which makes it simpler for the others to initiate the conversation.
• Since there is a single inbound email route, it’s possible to forward all incoming email messages to an email box or two, using them merely as notification stream and keeping an eye on really important messages that should be handled explicitly.

Another small detail. These ‘users‘ that are doing all the communications, are just kids barely out of the high school (and some – still in). This obviously implies that both the software and the process had to be quite simple and understandable, in order for everything to work out, while managing negotiations with serious companies. As it did work out – there were My Dream City events held for orphans in multiple cities in various countries around the world. And all this achieved with Relenta account, a WordPress installation, free Google Sites, and unlimited enthusiasm of FLEX alumni.

Now, this whole layout resembles something, does not it?

A single email inbox with Relenta CRM system that distributes the work-load in a simple way between multiple users with the ability to reassign work as users’ availability changes or load increases.

I find it curiously similar to a classical “incoming queue handled by a message router with N workers behind” layout of balancing a load in a distributed world. The latter, as we know, works quite well for scaling up/down as the load changes. Especially in the cloud computing environments.

Email communications (or usual paper mails) are the “real-world equivalent” of messaging middleware in the software world. This brings us all the way back to the Distributed Decide-Act-Report analogy for modeling distributed systems in a way similar to the real-world interactions.

In this analogy, Relenta (or any other similar email-based solution, if there is any) acts as an intelligent router and load-balancer. In on-premises environments ZeroMQ, Apache QPID and RabbitMQ are known to be used with success. In the cloud scenarios situation is less straightforward (i.e. glance through this discussion on working around Azure Queues throughput limitations), yet the analogy still holds.

The original post can be found here.

"Children, you've tried and failed miserably. The point is, never try!"

Trying to get attention from the media these days is an endeavor all but futile. Writers, bloggers and other influencers are inundated with poorly conceived product pitches. Naturally, this irritates the hell out of them and effectively renders everyone else’s PR efforts useless.

Says Paul Greenberg, a CRM thought-leader whose book, CRM at the Speed of Light, is translated into nine languages and used as a textbook at 70 universities:

[companies] either do their own public relations or hire public relations firms that are often, lets just say, until Brent Leary and my next public skewering of them, deficient in their public relations skills, sending ill considered emails that indicate no research done – and thus, the influencer, analyst, journalist, doesn’t give it the time of day.

Lo and behold, Paul Greenberg decided to bypass the PR agents — good riddance — and deal with CRM companies directly. To that end, he’s founded a “CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season” competition, which in his own words “is easy to enter but difficult to win.”

In a nutshell, 60 CRM-related companies (Relenta one among them) will be given one hour of face time with a panel of half a dozen judges. Paul has assembled some of the most respected names in traditional CRM, social CRM, and social media business.

After the demo, the judges will write a joint review that will be published in all their channels and media sponsor venues. The four winners will be judged by the public as well as the extended panel of judges.

This contest isn’t a zero-sum game, and that’s what I love about it most. Being a winner doesn’t require that someone become a loser. Everyone benefits. In the end, we all are the champions, and a big thank-you goes to Paul Greenberg for making it possible.

Written at: Marseilles, France

Try to set permissions on this

Here’s an observation: Back in 2006, when the first version of Relenta came out, potential customers often asked us about permissions, or the ability to exclude certain users from seeing parts of the CRM data. In the last couple of years permissions practically vanished from the CRM system requirement lists that we see every day.

My theory is that this is the effect of open nature of social networks. Everybody can see everything. Data and communications are shared. Transparency becomes the norm.

As an aside, it is technically very simple to set read/write permissions for each contact in a “pure” CRM or contact management system. By contrast, in Relenta it’s next to impossible due to it being a cross-breed between CRM and messaging (email, social networks).

In any case, CRM for small business isn’t designed to solve social problems in the workplace. If you don’t trust your colleagues, look into getting an enterprise CRM.

So. Contact view permissions. Ain’t gonna happen.

Written at: Stockholm, Sweden

Social activity is interspersed with email and CRM records (click to enlarge)

We recently wrote about our approach to social CRM. Now you can see it in action. Today’s update will help you be more productive — socially and otherwise — by further unifying communications and reducing data fragmentation. This means that you will be able to do your work with even fewer interruptions, clicks and open browser windows:

1. Import some or all of your social network connections into Relenta
2. Automatically associate social network messages with appropriate contacts
3. Post all your social network status updates with a single click directly from Relenta interface

Import contacts from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook

You can connect your Relenta account to any number of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, preview and then import some or all of the contacts into Relenta. Our system will match them against the existing contacts to keep your database clean and free of duplicates.

Unified inbox for email and social network messages

Strictly speaking, this update makes Relenta a unified messaging platform. Social network messages are made a part of each contact’s activity stream, chronologically interspersed with all other activities and events (such as sent and received emails, tasks, reminders, invoices, orders, notes, files, etc.).

The social network messages thus become shared action items in your CRM. It takes but one glance (or click) for your team to review the contact details and prior history, create new leads, respond to messages, discuss the issues internally if called for, determine the next action steps and who’s responsible.

Update all social networks with one click

You can post your status updates to any number of connected Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts with a single click, without having to login into each service separately or using yet another 3rd party app.

For the full description of changes and additions included in this update, click here.

Next steps

This social CRM release is our first incremental contribution towards what Gartner estimates to be $1B market in two years. Who will shape and define this market? You. Please add your ideas and comments to this post and on our user forum.

Written at: Koh Chang, Thailand

Thrive is an app that helps online stores optimize performance and sales

If you are an online store owner, chances are you don’t operate it at its full capacity. Why? Because there are too many variables to track and analyze. Collecting, reconciling and optimizing sales, traffic and advertising figures is a full-time job and then some. You don’t have the resources to do it right, if at all.

Our customer, software company Thrive, love independent stores. After years of helping out local stores increase sales, they got the idea of turning their process into an application, so any store could help themselves.

By using Relenta, Thrive can focus on its core functionality instead of building CRM features into the app. Says Elliot Yeo, Thrive’s web experience manager:

Relenta does it right. Simple. Fast. Easy. After wasting days and weeks on needlessly complicated CRM’s and API integrations it was refreshing to set up Relenta and integrate it with our application trouble-free in one afternoon.

Thrive feel like they have built something really cool that will give the independent store owners a huge advantage. They say it feels like being “an arms supplier in the war against box stores.”

Follow Thrive on Twitter and be the first to try their next-generation app that is coming this spring.

OnlineEd offers license training in real estate, insurance, contracting and many other careers

Our new client, OnlineEd, is an online vocational school offering training for a variety of careers (real estate, insurance, contracting, home inspection and so on). OnlineEd provide license training so you can get a state-required license, continuing education to maintain your license, and certification and professional designation courses to improve your career.

Paul Cleary, OnlineEd’s customer care and social network manager, says “Relenta takes the cake”:

The user interface alone sold me. It’s very pretty but, looks aren’t everything when it comes to web-applications as I’m sure you know. Relenta not only looks great, it works surprisingly well also.

…what about the customer service? Again, Relenta gets a gold star. During our trial period, naturally, we had a few questions, all of which were answered in a very friendly and VERY timely manner.

Thank you, Paul! It will only get better, promise.

For more information about OnlineEd or to enroll in their courses, please visit www.OnlineEd.com, send email to mail@OnlineEd.com or call, toll free, 866.519.9597