In this social customer age, customers rule and that includes those who buy CRM systems. They dictate the features and value for money and will pick those suppliers that listen and deliver.

 

Consona Corporation says that it has been hearing its customers and the result is Consona (News - Alert) Customer Management Version 7.0, the code base formerly known as Onyx CRM.

 

Consona CM Version 7.0 it says is a 100 percent customer designed release focused on two business themes: reducing the system's total cost of ownership for customers and increasing the productivity levels of and quality of experience for users.

 

According to Tim Hines, vice president of product management for Consona's CRM products, v7.0 addresses more than one quarter of Consona's application enhancement request backlog. With the version's key feature, Consona Navigator, 68 percent of customer enhancement requests around the search and task management functions of the system have been fulfilled.

 

Highlights of v7.0 include:

 

*          Search and work management improvements with Consona Navigator, a new feature that allows users across sales, marketing and customer service and support functions to easily search, save, and manage any field or combination of fields and act on the set of results

 

*          Usability improvements, including streamlined navigation, improved forecasting and quoting functionality, and other customer-requested features

 

*          A new Microsoft (News - Alert) SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services)-based business intelligence integration and data model with prepackaged dashboards and report templates across sales, marketing and customer service and support functions. Also, compatibility with the latest Microsoft standards

 

*          Support for a cloud-based deployment option

 

*          Social CRM enhancements, including tagging functionality

 

"The economy is beginning to pick back up, but its impact on all of us has been deep," said Tom Millay, general manager of Consona's CRM products. "For one, we've all faced a stark reminder about the value of productivity during tough times and measuring return on investment. Our customers have echoed this sentiment in their enhancement requests. As a result, Version 7.0 is a serious release with serious returns, which range from reducing the infrastructure footprint, need for customizations, and proprietary skill-set required to supporting the application, to increasing the amount of the overall solution covered by maintenance. It delivers features that are going to give anywhere from minutes to hours of productive time back to system users."

 

"We're very pleased to deliver this kind of return to our customers," added Hines. "Consona has always been a proponent of customer-driven development, founded on the sole idea that the 'next new thing' is not always the most practical. And while this release sets our customers up for the future, via cloud-readiness and progress on our long-term architectural vision, it also remains packed full of the features our customers have been asking for-the ones that will help them work smarter and faster today."