The small business world just doesn’t get the love that it deserves. Salesforce.com and the other giants sell to big enterprise customers that need a far different set of tools than their small-business counterparts. The gap is creating an opportunity for companies like Reamaze, which takes an approach that combines CRM with customer support.
Co-Founder Lu Wang says the touch has to be a bit different with small businesses. Small businesses do not talk about CRM but rather about how to keep customers happy, how to get new ones and how to keep that business flowing in the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week Internet world that we live in. He said they designed the service for people who have no clue what an “instance” is or “virtualization” means or whatever developer/enterprise lingo it may be.
Reamaze has a simple user interface. It pulls a customer’s different streams into one message environment: Email, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all appear in one queue. It also allows users to organize conversations and see their status. There are no ticket numbers as you would find in more enterprise-oriented products and services. Nor are there ticket bots. The attention is focused on conversing with the individual. It has a search functionality and a knowledge base where customers can search for their own answers.
With Twitter, Reamaze shows Twitter replies and direct messages and will link back to the full message if a customer exceeds the 140-character limit. Reamaze truncates a response that may be longer than 140 characters. The full response can be seen by the customer by clicking on the link.
The small business customer is an old-fashioned way to describe the entrepreneur we see today. The term dates back to the Depression era when the U.S. Government formed an agency to help people start businesses. It became what we know of today as the Small Business Administration (SBA), signed into law by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953.
Today, the Internet is the fastest-growing place of business, and for this reason, “small business” seems out of context. I am not sure what it is but the term seems old-fashioned in a world where more people are out of work and just doing tasks on TaskRabbit, selling goods on eBay or writing blog posts for that matter. It’s work done, in many cases, out of necessity. It’s this new generation that needs tools like Reamaze, accounting services like Xero and digital signature technologies such as HelloSign that make working online effective and efficient.