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Hosted CRM providers UpShot Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. are adding capabilities to their hosted services to make them interoperable with desktop and enterprise applications.
UpShot will announce this week UpShot Office, which links the companys Web-based service to a users desktop applications, such as Excel spreadsheets.
Salesforce.com earlier this month announced integration with computer telephony software from Genesys Inc. to make Salesforces hosted customer service offering a more viable solution.
UpShots release follows the companys Offline Express release last fall. That service allows customers to download data from UpShots service to Excel and retain the same look and feel as the UpShot service. Changes made to data are uploaded automatically when the user reconnects.
UpShot Office includes Offline Express and adds UpShot Office Connect, a series of APIs that link UpShot data with desktop applications such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Project and third-party systems for accounting, list management, e-mail, proposals, pricing and configuration.
UpShot Office also includes the UpShot Office Productivity Kit, which consists of templates that allow customers to build applications that take advantage of the new technology, including a proposal generator, a quoting tool, instant presentation, a dynamic matrix report or a mass update tool, said officials of the Mountain View, Calif., company.
Salesforce.com is focusing more on customer service with its latest release. The company has released a CTI (computer-telephony integration) Web Services interface that links the Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition service with Genesys customer interaction management platform using XML APIs.
Genesys has developed a G-plus adapter for Salesforce.com that routes incoming customer interactions managed by Genesys to Salesforce.com and integrates it with other customer data at the hosted service, such as contact and account information, customer service cases and marketing leads. Customer service representatives using Genesys software can access customer data from their companys Salesforce.com system.
Salesforce.com officials in San Francisco said they plan to extend CTI integration to other call center vendors systems in the near future.