Interview: Unifyo CEO, Benjamin Wirtz Talks Improving Customer Intelligence for Small Businesses
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Many small businesses find it challenging to manage interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects.
Most of the time it involves using customer relationship management (CRM) technology to organize, automate, and sync business processes—typically sales activities. However more small businesses have started using CRM tools to organize marketing, public relations, customer service, and technical support activities.
However, CRM adoption presents challenges.
For example, most CRM tools are too complex, lack user friendliness, are out of sync with current operations and are overall cumbersome.
Passionate about social computing, relationship management and efficiency, entrepreneur Benjamin Wirtz aimed to solve SMB challenges pertaining to CRM adoption. Along with co-founders Robin Message and Lewis Spearman, Wirtz created Unifyo a CRM application that brings 360 degree customer profiles into any web app – helping small to mid-sized organizations spend less time gathering customer information.
Ben, a social computing hacker, started independent research to optimize social network workflows, social processes, social data mining and improve relationship management. “Ben originally started Unifyo by developing an Android app that lead to Unifyo after a range of pivots,” according to gust.com.
“SMBs are underserved and handicapped when it comes to data integration,” says Wirtz. “So customer data is scattered across a multitude of applications, social networks and employees. Unifyo unifies this data and brings it into any web app pro-actively – like a CRM on the fly – leading to better service and sales conversion.”
Learn how Ben and his co-founders launched their startup and why he believes every relationship matters.
| Company: | Unifyo |
| Founder(s): | Benjamin Wirtz, Robin Message, Lewis Spearman |
| Location: | Cambridge, UK |
| Industry: | Software |
| Startup Year: | 2012 |
| Startup Costs: | $12,992 (£10,000) |
How I Got Started:
My co-founders and I are all passionate about social media, communication tools and having access to a better way of managing relationships. We found ourselves signing up for other customer relationship management (CRM) tools after being sold on the benefits of organizing all of our key contacts and sales opportunities. But like most companies, we were not disciplined enough and found it to be a time sink.
