Resco Mobile CRM Vision Vision for next 3 years & more Table of Contents Mission Statement... 2 Main Areas of Focus... 3 CRM Tool... 3 Communication... 3 Calendaring... 3 Cloud Storage... 3 Customer Apps... 3 Maps & Routes.... 3 Inspections... 3 Communication... 4 Email... 4 Instant Messaging... 4 Voice... 4 Calendaring... 5 Unified View... 5 Planning.... 5 Travel... 5 Cloud Storage... 6 Providers... 6 SharePoint.... 6 Non-CRM User Apps... 7 Maps & Routes... 8 CRM at Glance... 8 CRM on the Road... 8 Inspections... 9 Dedicated UI & Configuration... 9 Dynamic or static definition... 9 CRM Tool... 10 UI Framework.... 10 Platform... 10 Security... 10 Afterword... 11 * This document outlines the priorities and areas for next development of Resco Mobile CRM. Published on March 13, 2015.
Mission Statement The ultimate goal for Resco Mobile CRM is to become the main tool for your mobile business. The idea is to move beyond just viewing Dynamics CRM data and provide an excellent, easy to use, visually appealing and full featured tool for businessmen, salespeople, service technicians or anyone on the go. One app that will satisfy all work-related needs be it route planning, navigation, calendar management & scheduling, sending and receiving emails and even instant messaging within the team. Even though we firmly believe in this goal, please note that this roadmap might be subject to change. There are two main reasons why this might happen. The first is ever changing and fast evolving mobile landscape. This forces Resco to constantly reconsider the plans and adjust and adapt to new technologies, operating systems and challenges of the mobile ecosystem. The second and even more important is Resco s close cooperation with partners and customers, who submit their requests, suggest new features and affect prioritization. Since we want every single implementation of Resco to become a success, these are important impulses for our future planning. 2/11 Resco Mobile CRM Vision
Main Areas of Focus CRM Tool Resco Mobile CRM primarily is and will continue to be a Dynamics CRM mobile client. Dynamics CRM data is the foundation of the app and therefore we will continue to improve and focus on the CRM aspect of Resco Mobile CRM. Communication One of the main areas of improvement will be communication. Be it email integration with Gmail or Exchange, better and simpler writing of emails in dedicated editor or instant messaging with other users directly in the application, we believe that communication is an integral part of the mobile business process. Calendaring Scheduling and managing a workday or a workweek is another primary role of a mobile tool. Resco Mobile CRM will encompass all your business appointments, as well as personal ones, and aggregate with Google or Exchange services. It will allow looking at group calendars or notify the user once a meeting has been scheduled. Calendar in Resco Mobile CRM will be the only one your users will ever need to use! Cloud Storage The IT world is moving to the cloud that is for sure. Different providers supply many types of cloud services including document and data storage, document management or applications as services. Resco s initial focus will be on data storage, where combining data access to services like Google Drive and Dropbox with a built-in offline mode will give you functionality far beyond standard CRM. Enhancing the existing SharePoint integration is of course also on the to-do list. Customer Apps An easy way to create visually appealing consumer apps using the familiar Resco tools will be available; providing a direct channel between a company and its end customer. Providing CRM data access directly to non-crm users will allow the fastest way to keep the external audience up-to-date without the hassle of additional data storage, migration, or integration all of this in a custom app on your favorite app store. Maps & Routes Being on the road is basically the synonym of being mobile. Resco Mobile CRM, with its goal of becoming the ultimate tool for the mobile business, will easily cover this area as well. Allowing better integration with maps, where business data combine with points of interest, will make navigating within an area a piece of cake. And route planning built-in way to optimize the routes of the mobile workforce means never wasting time and money on a suboptimal customer visit plan. Inspections One of the typical areas for mobile process is an inspection or a survey. Many mobile scenarios include a part where there is an inspection performed on site, following a pre-defined scenario or questionnaire. Resco will offer a dedicated set of features to configure the mobile application to capture this process with simplicity. Dynamic or static approach, wizards, multimedia import or different paths in the survey depending on selected answers all of this available in a couple of clicks. Resco Mobile CRM Vision 3/11
Communication Today s smart mobile devices evolved from communication tools and communication is still the #1 purpose they serve. Apart from verbal and non-verbal communication, we believe that email is the main workhorse of all business communication and instant-messaging is the quick on-the-go tool. Email Our plan is to merge a powerful email client with a CRM client and bring it right into the user s hand. In order to connect to user s emails, we will utilize direct mobile device to server connection Google Gmail and MS Exchange. Standard and advanced email client functionality will be included, such as sending and receiving HTML emails with attachments, read/unread tracking, moving, archiving and deleting. The email functionality will be enhanced through CRM integration features such as tracking associating an email with CRM records (e.g. opportunity) right on the device or using CRM address book and transforming addresses into CRM contacts/leads. Sharing links to CRM data and CRM reports will also be available and file sharing will tap into our Cloud Storage support. Of course, all of the above will be fully customizable and implemented with an enterprise-level security. Instant Messaging We see IM as a natural fit for mobile devices, especially with the upcoming trend of wearables. A simple notification delivered instantly can be the decisive factor between winning and losing an opportunity, or might also save lives. The main target of IM is user-to-user communication, where the messages can be delivered to co-workers, but also to clients as a part of a personalized customer service. Another great way to use IM is a group communication creating groups that share info on CRM records based on common interests. Including flexible data notifications in the IM flow enables the user to always stay on top of his responsibilities and important updates. What we see as underserved area is rich instant messaging customizable structured QA Forms to be submitted by the recipient. Images and other attachments from CRM or Cloud sources will also be supported in IM. We are also working on webrtc integration, enabling Audio/Video communication directly from the mobile app. Voice Our application already provides deep phone integration. Our plan in this area is to gather more information using the phone number through social networks and other web-services. We are also looking into integrating third party IM and Messaging platforms. 4/11 Resco Mobile CRM Vision
Calendaring Appointments, tasks and their scheduled notifications on our mobile devices give us the peace of mind that we are not forgetting something important. Today, our app gives you a lot of options for visualizing your data in time, including dynamic data-based colors and multiple calendars each with optionally aggregated views. Unified View Our vision is to give the user a unified view of his business and personal plans. The view can be a quick overview or a detailed day, week or month plan. While we already provide quite a lot of functionality when it comes to views, we plan to enrich it by including other sources: e.g. Google Calendar and Exchange. Planning We will concentrate on the planning phase as well. This means checking the availability of users (contacts, leads), inviting them to meetings, either by email or push notifications. Group calendars and resource-time optimization is also a much requested feature. The second aspect to planning is location. We will exploit the device s position tracking to bring you location based notifications. Another great opportunity we see is to tie the already existing device tracking features into the planning process. Travel We know that our users spend a lot of time on the road, thus helping with the actual travel is an area we want to concentrate on. The plan is to integrate OpenStreetMaps and deliver navigation and travel duration help right from the app. Local Weather information will be provided in more places out of the box. We want to help you organize your travel and keep up with changing road & flight conditions. To enable this, we are investigating integration with services like TripIt. Tracking of expenses as you move and planning for multiple users is also a feature we see as natural fit for Mobile CRM. Resco Mobile CRM Vision 5/11
Cloud Storage Providers Working with documents is an integral part of the CRM workflow. Whether it is to show product presentations to customers, or utilizing service manuals and knowledge base, having access to documents is crucial. Today the application allows you to play and record multimedia, work with PDF and Office documents. We have also added the option to generate reports and attach them or other files to emails. Provided you have paired you mobile device with a supported printer, printing your documents is also an option. Our plan is to broaden the available storage options from CRM and SharePoint to include Google Drive and Dropbox. Full offline report generation is also in the works, including multimedia and signature support. SharePoint Existing application features will also get improved, where SharePoint will get online, search and delete support. Additionally, we plan on moving beyond file storage and support SharePoint data fields. 6/11 Resco Mobile CRM Vision
Non-CRM User Apps Building a dedicated app for external non-crm users on top of Resco Mobile CRM platform is already a reality. Even at this moment, the option to leverage the Resco technology to build mobile applications is there; allowing companies to build tailor-made applications for end customers who are to be directly connected to Dynamics CRM. This creates the most straightforward and intermediate way for companies to inform their customers about new products, gather their feedback or simply communicate while all data is instantly available in Dynamics CRM. We see a huge potential in many areas: Retail / FMCG companies informing their customers about new products and offers Restaurants creating a loyalty application Mayor s Office or City Council reaching out directly to the citizens Events like conferences creating an application for an event Health care institutions communicating directly with patients Small businesses promoting their area of business Subcontractors or Volunteers with direct access to CRM data and many others. We will enhance our tools to handle this task better be it having more control over the visual aspect of the application, easier means to create a completely tailor-made app or even a WYSIWYG editor for changing certain design aspects. We will also focus on making the branding process creating a branded application with custom icons and splash screens on different mobile app stores as easy as possible. Resco Mobile CRM Vision 7/11
Maps & Routes Being mobile means being on the road. And that requires maps. And a good plan. Maps are already present in Resco Mobile CRM, but our vision is to make them integrated with all the info a mobile user might need. And route planning an often requested feature will make sure this info comes to a good use. CRM at Glance When working with maps, users on the go usually need more than just to see the location of a CRM record. They need more information like points of interest to make the navigation (and especially searching) more resourceful. The plan is to extend the search to contain addresses and POIs side by side to CRM data. This way, searching for a client or client s location can be done within one application, one map and one search box. And once map will be enriched with external data like traffic information, there will be no need to look elsewhere. CRM on the Road Planning of the day and the visits is essential for a successful workforce on the road. We will be including a mechanism for not to only plan the visits, but also to optimize the routes depending on multiple factors. Mobile CRM will automatically calculate the distance and time for your route or provide the same tools to the manager or to a dispatcher who plans the routes for the whole team. Real-time tracking of mobile devices to check if everything goes according to plan and to identify and solve problems as soon as they arise will be available as well. Push notification will be automatically sent to a user when a course change is necessary. Tracking will be available on-demand or triggered automatically at a certain speed or location. The movement log display will highlight more information: speeding, planned vs. actual visits. You will also be able to use it for accounting. 8/11 Resco Mobile CRM Vision
Inspections We ve seen our customers using the mobile app in an inspection scenario at the very beginning of Resco Mobile CRM. This typically means a mobile worker enters a site and performs a check going through a checklist of items or performing a survey or questionnaire with the personnel on site. During all these years, setting this up was a highly custom job performed typically by the partner using all the customization potential of Woodford, aligning with the requirements of each particular customer and scenario. However, the core of the work was almost always the same and we ve seen a high demand to make this functionality easily and intuitively available. Dedicated UI & Configuration We are going to release a dedicated user interface elements covering the inspection scenario. This will include a representation of the checklist for the inspection or the survey questions the user should follow and answer. This will be easily configurable within the Woodford tool, allowing to add also multimedia content items (e.g. take a picture of a roof if damage was detected) or a wizard-like UI to guide the users through the process. Dynamic or static definition Due to the different nature of each implementation, the system will be flexible when it comes to data definition. The survey questions can be defined as fields of an entity static definition or they can be dynamically constructed out of the contents of some records of particular entity type and structured into sets of questionnaires. Different inspection or questionnaire paths can be captured, so an answer to a question can subsequently display a different follow-up question. Resco Mobile CRM Vision 9/11
CRM Tool We will still work on enriching the main functionality of our application, which is and will be a CRM tool. This includes continuing UI improvements, deepening the integration with mobile platforms and extending the built-in security. UI Framework Our application is already offering many ways of working with the UI beyond the pre-defined layout. We will continue on this path and allow not only elements like detail items or entire forms to be constructed dynamically, but also to create generic applications independent of the underlying entities and data scheme. Platform We strongly believe that deep integration with mobile platforms and possibilities of mobile devices is a key to successful implementation and deployment of a mobile project. Thanks to the native apps which Resco provides, we can benefit from accessing all these features and make them available to users. Supporting the latest mobile devices and operating systems has been always our number one priority and there is no way that would change in the future. Taking this promise seriously, we are exploring also Smart Glasses and Wearable gadgets to utilize the potential of these devices and have a solution ready even before you ll realize you need one! Security CRM typically works with sensitive data and we understand the possible risks. Enriching the security layer even more, we plan on adding functions like GeoFencing an option to define the geographic area where the users are allowed to use the application or TouchID to make sure that the highest security level is available. If this wouldn t be enough, we work closely with 3 rd party MDM vendors to ensure that our application can be used within an infrastructure that provides security on the whole device level. 10/11 Resco Mobile CRM Vision
Afterword The years spent building Mobile CRM have been very busy, but also very rewarding. What started as a simple application grown into a powerful tool with almost unlimited customization options. In the next years we want to move our solution to the next level, building the ultimate mobile business tool. We hope that you accompany us on the way. Resco Mobile CRM Vision 11/11