PBworks has launched PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at PBworks about this new offering that they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration to indicate support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through CRM.

This platform allows for customer communication to more easily move out of the traditional channels of email and telephones to a more productive and transparent collaboration platform.  Now organizations have been using wikis and other collaborative tools for some time to set up shared space to communication with customers. It is one of the more common use cases that go across organizational boundaries. I asked Chris what is different with this new release.

He said that they have recognized that customer collaboration was one of the stronger uses cases of PBworks so they have designed the PBworks Customer Relationship Edition to optimize for this activity.  There are four main new capabilities.

The first is automated custom workspace creation.  The average company may have hundreds or even thousands of customers every year.  Customizing and personalizing each of those workspaces could take a considerable amount of time.  The Customer Relationship Edition automates that process by allowing you to specify “variables” in your workspace templates that are replaced with specific values when a new workspace is created.  For example, your presales extranet template might include “Client Name,” “Company Name,” and “Account Rep Name” on various pages.  When you create a new workspace for working with a potential customer, you simply fill in those three values up front, and PBworks automatically makes the substitution on any page on which they appear. Below is a sample branded login screen for a workspace.

The second key new capability is customer engagement monitoring.  One of the most frustrating things for any salesperson or account manager is not knowing if the prospect or customer is engaged in the relationship what actions they are taking.  PBworks provides this knowledge by tracking prospect and customer activity for you. It looks at several things: whenever a customer logs into their workspace, PBworks sends you an alert; whenever a customer views content or downloads a file, PBworks records the action. You can view customer activity as part of the overall activity stream, or filter out all distractions and review it in isolation. Below you can see a sample activity notification.

Third is the ability to set up common spaces to make information easily accessible that you want to share across all customers. This allows you to update this information once and provide secure access from every individual workspace you set up. Each customers can only see the there activities and not what the others customers are doing.  There is an associated chat feature with common repository but only people on the same team can see and engage in a chat.

In addition, there is also the ability to customize workspace templates to make it easy to adjust certain types of information while keeping other content constant.  You can create a PBworks workspace from within Salesforce.com and populate it with existing data from Salefcore.com. Then you can launch the workspace form within Salesforce.com. Below is a sample screen showing some of the customization features.

The PBworks Customer Relationship Edition is a nice addition for several reasons. First, it makes it easier to set up and operate one of the most common use cases for collaborative platforms. Second, it is a great example, of a vendor listening to its customers and acting of capabilities they request. I can see more examples of customized collaboration platform editions targeted at high value use cases.