Nov 07

What is UCAP CRM?

An Introduction

^{Up Close and Personal Corporation Pty Ltd}

UCAP CRM is a new concept in Customer and Contact Relationship Management (What is CRM?). UCAP is the first CRM system designed to be analogous to the real world. From its conception, UCAP focused on simple but comprehensive interfaces, complex yet transparent data structures and integration of a wide range of common office practices. The database structure is practically unlimited in its relational links. UCAP is purpose built to increase your client’s satisfaction, increase your company’s productivity, and reduce management workload.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, UCAP uses Object Linking and Embedding to pass data to your purpose built applications. Currently this provides direct links to Microsoft Word for hard copy correspondence, Microsoft Outlook or any MAPI compliant eMail Engine for eMail distribution and FaxFacts or Microsoft Fax for facsimile output. All address references are contained within UCAP so there is no need to maintain several address books. Seagate Crystal Reports is the reporting tool of choice for UCAP offering a myriad of views of your data. UCAP follows ISO 9000 principles of fully documented tracking of all user activity as well as maintenance and follow up of all outwards correspondence.

The UCAP Structure - Mimicking Real Life

Imagine a typical company. It is be made up of various branches in different locations. Each of these branches may have a number of addresses associated with it. Perhaps a physical address, postal address, warehouse address, accounts address etc.

There are usually departments within each branch and telephony contacts which may be company wide or department specific. UCAP is designed to accommodate all of these real world attributes. No longer are you limited to a couple of business phones, maybe a fax and some eMail references. UCAP has unlimited telephony contacts which can be described by any freehand text and can link directly to telephone, fax, eMail, URL, or VOIP address.

The company you imagined also has employees. UCAP considers a personal view of data to be in parallel to the company view. People too can be associated with unlimited addresses and unlimited telephony contacts. UCAP then allows you to make associations between people and companies. You can have any client associated with any number of companies.

This association means that there is no duplication of data. Each client need only exist once in the database and can then be attached or moved from company to company. We can see our company structure in the UCAP tree view below.

Personal View

We can start examining the personal data screen. This screen is broken into the basic client data, a Speed Search Edit box, a Speed Search Result set pick list and a Company View showing all companies and branches that the client is associated with.

Below we see that Coral Ford is linked to four companies and that she is the CEO of Hexagon in New York.

Search methods include basic surname, first name, middle name ordered search, a Soundex, and a wide result set search. All searches are keystroke activated, there is no need to hit the enter key to return a result set.

It's easy to add a person into UCAP. <click here to see a video> In fact the more data UCAP holds, the more lookups will assist you and the faster the process becomes. UCAP's Duplicate reduction also get smarter as the number of records increases.

Colour coding is integrated throughout UCAP. In the view above you can see a blue background in the edit fields. This is a guide to the current view whether Personal or Company for all related address and telephony data. Selecting a company from the company box will alter the colour set appropriately. The labels for FirstName, Surname and Salutation are linked to attributes associated with the current client. Almost all objects on this screen, the labels, edit boxes, background, etc can be set by the user to any key attributes assigned to the particular client. As you scroll to the client the colours will change and the fly by help will show what attribute is causing the change. This gives immediate highlighting of important client traits without requiring the user to read every note and trait assigned to the client.

By the way, since Coral is creating correspondence from any of her four companies, she uses the My Branch facility to dynamically change her company's letterhead, signature and word processor templates on the fly.

click here for more information on the Personal View

Company View

The Company View gives a reciprocal view of the data. UCAP is designed to provide full structural representation of any company. From this view you can see all members of a particular branch of a company or you can narrow the view to select an existing department. This filtering of the displayed data will also show just the relative telephony references for this department.

Jumping between Company and Personal View is only a mouse click or hot key away.

UCAP supports businesses that operate from many company names. UCAP users can assign themselves to one or more of these companies.

It's easy to add a new company into UCAP. <click here to see a video>. (UCAP's ability to track connections, codes, references and to market to all people in a company is unequalled in the CRM industry.)

Click here for more information on the Company View

You may have an unlimited number of Address Screens for any one Person or Company. The Address Screen allows you to quickly scroll through all associated addresses. As the address change all associated telephony data changes.

Telephony

You can associate unlimited numbers of connections to any address.

Telephony data can be hidden, published or associated with a particular department.

UCAP Telephony Module is context sensitive, a click on a phone number dials the number, a click on an eMail opens Outlook and starts your eMail ....

No more incorrect dialed numbers! If you double click on a telephony connection it will launch the associated interface. This may be your eMail engine, VOIP engine, Digital PABX, Web Browser, or Modem Dialer.

UCAP CRM interfaces to Call Centers. We use TeleVantage - so that when we <double click> on a phone number, UCAP causes TeleVantage to grab a line, dial a number, then make the phone at our desk ring with the connection initiated!

Likewise, you can store any Web Page you like and have UCAP take you straight there.

FREE Phone calls! The latest VOICE OVER IP (VOIP) technology is also supported by UCAP. You can call another VOIP soft phone or use your VOIP provider to connect you directly to a telephone handset. All of the data storage and management required for VOIP is now available in UCAP.

No more "Lost People". Like most companies, you probably have lots of people in your contact list but no eMail addresses. UCAP's patented eMail Skeletons solves this problem. Enter an eMail skeleton once for a company and have it replicated through all employees in the company!

Data Entry

You might expect entering data and making the appropriate associations could be difficult but UCAP’s Data Entry Wizard puts it all together for you.

UCAP provides pages for editing personal data and linked pages for company data. The UCAP Data Entry Wizard automatically makes all the links between the companies you enter, their addresses and their telephony contacts.

Because UCAP has direct parallels between personal data and company data, you can separate personal mobile phones for example from company specific numbers. There are no limits to the number of these links between personnel, companies, addresses and telephony references.

UCAP imports your Outlook and Windows address book data, organising Outlook's unstructured data in the process. Data can be synchronised between UCAP, Outlook and PDA devices (for mobile CRM users).

Never double or triple handle sales information again!

The UCAP MYOB Module permits two way data flow (import-synchronisation) between UCAP and MYOB for MYOB Cards and Items. View MYOB Sales journals. Produce Quotations in seconds. UCAP creates Sales Orders for MYOB Items and then feeds the Sales Order directly into MYOB.

UCAP also synchronises to other accounting software such as Jiwa, synchronising with inventories and making it easy for all users to generate and eMail quotations whilst still on the phone.

No CRM system is complete without a Sales Forecast-Funnel, so UCAP provides the full funnel with extensive filters to let you find just what you want. UCAP currently interfaces to MYOB and JIWA. Other accounting systems will soon be supported.

All addresses are individually collated in UCAP and a cross reference is made every time a new record is entered. This ensures any duplicate addresses are trapped, identifying any pre-existence of an address and showing which companies and clients are referenced already. If an address exists, UCAP employs Address Completion to insert all related fields including Postcode and any telephony data. This is one of several features available within UCAP to reduce duplication of data and speed data entry. UCAP can even log alias names for any company. If a client calls and uses an acronym or abbreviation for a company, this can be logged and used as a valid company name when searching. The search will then display the correct formal company name.

UCAP ships with Post / Zip Code lookup support for codes and suburbs. Imported data may be validated and automatically entered using these lookup tables. Zip code tables are supplied for Australia, France, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Other countries' zip code tables may be easily imported.

Naturally, we don’t simply store names and addresses. UCAP contains an additional data area which is pre-built to get you up and running quickly without any necessity to define new tables and screens.

UCAPs unique coding module lets you focus on the sales tasks and let UCAP automatically take care of the marketing responsibilities. Enter codes for a person when you talk to them. UCAPs Linked Codes will automatically summarise your detailed codes into codes that the marketing department will use when using UCAPs eMail Blast, Fax Blast, or Mail Merge Modules. For example, a "Visual Basic" code entered could be associated with a code of "Software Developer", or perhaps a "Mercedes" car code could cause a "Luxury Car" code to be created. In summary - the Salesman enters "Mercedes" and the Marketing department can then immediately market to all "Luxury Car" owners, including Mercedes, Porsche, BMW ...

UCAP’s key attributes, Capabilities, Class, Source, Events, and Key Traits are all user defined pick lists and can be set to act as triggers. For easy identification, colours can be associated with these attributes and if triggered, cause a colour change on any part of the UCAP screen. ie A bad debtor will cause the surname to appear in RED.

Governments apply severe fines to companies that call persons without their consent, and these countries often provide DO NOT CALL lists. UCAP supports importing DNC, Unsubscribe and other contact limiting lists and visually alerts you when you are attempting to contact a person (with a DNC flag) via Telephone, Fax, eMail or any other marketing medium.

With UCAP, you can log any products owned by your clients or even register they are interested in a product. This can be referenced against just the client or both the client and their company. In this way, if a client leaves a company you can still hold the reference to the product by the company.

Freelance Notes

Freelance notes may be stored for the person or company. Double clicking on the notes area brings up a full MS WordPad text editor for adding fonts, colours, spell checking and printing.

UCAP CRM Courses Module

If you are involved in providing training, UCAP gives you the opportunity to register course structure and requirements provided for your clients. Even if you have staff regularly attending courses, this is an easy way to collate the dates and times

UCAP CRM Help Desk Module

Many businesses offer support for the products but few have a formal register for resolving these important client issues. UCAP has an integrated help system which can log all support calls and store all the systems and solutions. The help system has recursive links within UCAP, external links to standard help files and direct URL links to the web.

UCAP is designed to keep all of your day to day corporate business under the one umbrella. Your Product or Service information is readily available. Product data may be manually entered into the UCAP or automatically loaded to/from your accounting system via a scheduled process. One client has accounting data updated into UCAP via an automated scheduled process every fifteen minutes.

The UCAP Products Module holds all of your product, supplier and reseller information, pricing, availability and reference material. The module makes it easy to provide quotations via letters, eMails or faxes.

Making a quote is easy. Select as many products as you wish, add them into your client quote, embed this data in an email, fax or letter and keep a record of the issued quote with very little effort.

The Product Module has interfaces to connect to almost every windows based Accounting program. Known supported platforms include JIWA and MYOB. Other Accounting platforms are also being tested. Contact us if you want UCAP CRM to interface with your Accounting program.

The following UCAP Video Tours are available - showing you how to use the Product Module

Click here to take a video tour of UCAP's Product Module

Click here to take a video tour on how to eMailing a quotation

Click here to take a video tour on how to process a Product Purchase

(Note: To enable a better display, the following Product screen is split into two and displayed vertically.)

UCAP CRM Contacts Module

Of course, no contact management system is complete without a Contacts Screen. UCAP allows complete timed tracking of all client interactions.

Whether you are sending a quick eMail or carrying out face to face consultancy you can log all events in UCAP. You can reference other staff contacts so clients are not left unattended if staff are absent. Managers can review all staff and client activity and build detailed reports on staff productivity and client demands.

The content of all outgoing correspondence is stored and displayed for follow-up on the (default) carry forward date. A Historical View is also available to show all previous contacts with each client enabling accurate assessment of the client demands made upon your company resources.

Unlike other CRM products, UCAP CRM can display contacts for persons and or companies that you have had had contact with. So when the client leaves his company, all contacts remain linked to the original company!

CRM Marketing has never been easier with UCAP CRM Campaign Manager. Send thousands of eMails then track who opened them, when opened, how many times opened, and manage unsubscribe and returns.

There's no point having a CRM system without easy data importing and synchronisation services.

UCAP can synchronise UCAP data with Outlook, your Phone or PDA!

When installing, UCAP will automatically import your contacts from Microsoft Outlook. Contacts can also be automatically imported from your Windows Address books. UCAP can also import from spreadsheets, text files, databases, accounting systems or web pages.

UCAP can export to Outlook, Crystal Reports or to any windows development environment.

UCAP will also export and keep data synchronised between UCAP and Outlook. For the user that synchronises their phones, PDAs or other utilities to Outlook, this enables UCAP data to be exported to Outlook and your Palm Pilot or Phone!

For organisations requiring custom builds, UCAP Corporation is able to supply UCAP pre-loaded with your company's information. This means that you can have UCAP customised to include your data, then give UCAP to all your clients - free of charge!

UCAP has a comprehensive Data Mining (data search) capability. The Data Mining module allows precision grouping of any of you data based on the code attributes that you assign to your clients and companies. Use these filtered lists as the basis for eMail, Fax blasts or Mail Merges for newsletters or any other correspondence.

If you are a manager, UCAPs Data Mining Module provides an invaluable tool for tracking activities of your staff and clients. Location filters, date stamps and data perspectives can be managed with a few mouse clicks.

How many CRM tools include a Data Warehouse - ONLY UCAP!

If you need even closer analysis of you data have a look at what you can achieve through the UCAP Data Warehouse. Denormalizing data can be a serious challenge for any skilled IT whiz. Only the most advanced professional database systems have Data Warehouses, costing normally US$500,000 or more to construct and maintain. But UCAP does it all for you!

The UCAP Data Warehouse ensures that performance does not suffer as the database size increases. The UCAP Data Warehouse enables the UCAP database to grow to enormous sizes.

For larger* UCAP databases, reports run against the UCAP Data Warehouse provide: (compared to ad-hoc reports run against the normal UCAP database tables)

Performance increases of at least 1000%!;

    The ability to run reports on a separate UCAP Server. A separate UCAP Reporting Server optimises reporting capabilities whilst preserving the active UCAP Server to provide the highest performance for current UCAP Users; and

    The ability to run extremely complex reports instantly against the UCAP server that might take days or not even be possible when run against the normalised UCAP database.

* a larger database in this example would store more than 50,000 companies and 100,000 persons. Most CRM systems use database management systems that do not scale to 10% of this size.

Even if you don't need a Data Warehouse now - it's nice to know that when you do, or want OLAP reports, that UCAP will still "SCREAM" with performance for the end users whilst simultaneously delivering reports to marketing and management departments!

UCAP ships with a runtime version of Crystal Reports version 10. Use this or you own version to run reports using UCAP data then export the resulting information as required to the web, spreadsheets, MS Word ...

UCAP ships with pre-designed reports for most reporting requirements. UCAP Consultants can create any new report you desire.

Crystal and Business Objects repositories and OLAP reports are available for those who want to "press the pedal to the metal".

The History module logs almost all users' UCAP activities. The log permits monitoring system usage, Users' activities & abilities, and can be used in staff performance reviews.

UCAP is designed to operate with any ANSI ’92 compliant SQL database.

UCAP is currently implemented with the free version 6 of the InterBase Client Server database. InterBase is a very fast, low maintenance database. The UCAP database provides over 120 tables and demonstrates a search times of less than 1 second from a data set of over 1,000,000 records. UCAP CRM's database server can be installed on Windows and Linux Servers.

For companies wishing to increase performance even further, a commercial version of Interbase is available. This version supports multi-processors and increases UCAP performance by over to 1,000%!

UCAP CRM Help, Support, and Documentation

UCAP has an extensive documentation library spanning over 5000 pages to suit beginner, expert and administrator users.

Documentation is provided in the form of Windows help files that you may run at your PC or in Web (HTML) format (constantly updated) at www.ucap.biz.

Documentation is extensively categorised and cross-referenced so that you always have information at hand.

The extensive on-line help is so good that we do not charge you for customer support.

UCAP Video Guides are also provided in Windows and Web format.

UCAP CRM Training is available. Courses can be provided on site or by UCAP Trainers and Consultants can also help implement and maintain your CRM installation.

UCAP will work with your Web Server to log web customer usage. CRM programmers can use UCAP's eCommerce Module Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and other CRM tools to interface UCAP with ASP, PHP, .Net and other Web Servers.

The UCAP server and workstations require a Windows 98 or later (NT, 2000 or XP) PC with 128 Mb or more of RAM and 200MHz or faster processor.

UCAP's comprehensive Checklists you through installation, update and ,maintenance procedures.

The UCAP server is setup using the UCAP Install program. This setup program may be down-loaded from the Internet (www.UCAP.Biz) or run from a CD (available from Up Close and Personal Corporation.

UCAP workstations are installed by running the setup program from the UCAP server.

UCAP workstations require Windows 98 or later with at least 128MB RAM.

The UCAP Server requires at least Windows 2000 or newer. The UCAP CRM Client Server (SQL) database can reside on Windows or Linux PCs.

The UCAP system is undergoing continued research and development. New versions are released only after extreme internal and beta testing procedures have been completed.

New versions (containing your requested changes and our new features) are released to the web about once a month for free downloading.

Please contact us if you have any requests or suggestions!

UCAP CRM is provided with one free licence for one user (freeware). UCAP can be downloaded free of charge from www.UCAP.Biz Licences for additional users may be purchased from Up Close and Personal Corporation.

UCAP CRM is optimised for English speaking countries. UCAP CRM Postcode support is included for Australia, France, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom (UK). Postcode tables for the USA will be provided as soon as we receive a PostCode table from the USA (come on - catch up USA!).

This is just a brief introduction to the UCAP's features and benefits. There are many other UCAP Modules and features to discover.

Download UCAP with one Free UCAP CRM licence for one user. The licence can be expanded via a software key to support up to 1000 users. Contact Us to trial UCAP CRM with many users.

See Also

Summary - UCAP Screen Shots

UCAP-_Full_Screen_Shot

UCAP_For Dummies - Table of Contents

Top Ten Features

Top Ten Benefits

What is CRM?

What users love about UCAP

Take the UCAP Video Tour!

UCAP Bundling Opportunities

UCAP Data Loading Service

About Up Close and Personal Corporation

Contact Us

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