For many businesses CRM is at the center of the way business gets done. The sales team uses it to keep track of leads and opportunities, marketing uses it to capture new leads or target a specific group within their own customer base, accounting uses it to track closed opportunities and the list goes on. Over the past year we have talked to many businesses looking to get the most from their CRM investment and make their employees more productive. While they are happy with their CRM overall, their employees could be far more productive with just a few improvements to the user experience, filling in the gaps in application functionality. Most of the requests fall into two categories: user interface or data integration.

In the first category, some businesses have all the data they need inside the CRM but the process of getting or changing the data is cumbersome for end users and does not match the typical process an employee goes through. An example of this scenario came to us from a Salesforce.com customer. They were happy with the overall CRM and had moved most of the operations for the company to their new CRM but limits on the UI kept them from customizing the layout to fit the processes they had for fulfilling orders and tracking the cost of goods sold delivered on each opportunity. A Bungee-powered application was quickly built that embedded an inventory manager right within the opportunity page providing the employees with a single interface to enter and track inventory, previously a multi-page process. This application helped the warehouse employees track specific inventory items to a particular customer and the accounting office was able to track the exact cost associated with each opportunity.

By way of data integration, WideLens is a great example of bringing data in from multiple sources and presenting it in a single view. WideLens brings calendar data from Exchange, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook and iCalendar into a single calendar. For CRM users, this type of integration keeps them working within the CRM rather than bouncing from application to application to manage their schedule between systems.

Bungee Connect was a natural choice for these solutions because the developers had the flexibility to build the user interface that made the most sense for the application along with the Ajax interactivity to make it user-friendly. The other requirement we heard a lot was that the application must be hosted. Most of them are using CRM-as-a-service and the thought of hosting their own integrations just didn’t make sense. With Bungee Connect, they could build any application and didn’t need any software to do it.

Over the weekend we updated a section of our website dedicated to helping CRM customers get more by using Bungee Connect to build applications that fiill-in the missing functionality or data connectivity. We now have sample code and a developer center for Netsuite, Oracle CRM On-Demand, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

-Brad