Clienteq Provides Collaboration Platform for Professional Services Firms
by Bill Ives
Now here is a good idea from Brightside Software, an enterprise 2.0 style SaaS collaboration platform geared to the niche market of professional services firms (e.g., lawyers, accountants and consultants). Brightside Software was founded in June 2007 and Nuospace was their first product. I covered it here earlier (see Nuospace: An Easy-to-Use Wiki for the Small to Midsize Business Market). It is a general purpose collaboration tool for the SMB market. Now they started with the technology from Nuospace and applied it vertically.
I spoke with Philip Struchkov in Business Development at Brightside about Clienteq, their latest product. It is designed to help professional service firms better collaborate and share content with their clients. Because it is a cloud application and always available, Clineteq also promotes more client self-service to obtaining information.
Philip took me on a tour. We stared at the home page where content is organized around clients. You can see the action items and feedback from each client at a quick glance as you can see below. Then you drill down to a particular client page for more details.
Going to the page for a particular client, you can see the plan for your engagement and its status. This plan can be exported as a MS Word document. You also see the key pages such as a master service agreement, payment calculation, and other important documents related to the engagement. Recent messages are also displayed as shown below.
Drilling down to a specific page, you find the workflow around this page. Below is an example of an online document page. You can see when revisions where made and comment on this changes. Changes are tracked and you can return to earlier versions. You can easily move back and forth through different sections. Any actions related to a page are noted and can be tracked.
When creating a new page, you can upload a file or create a document online. You can also add a new area (like a folder) for the page. Messages can be page specific and can be expressed as positive or negative. The design appears to be very intuitive and maps to a professional services client management workflow. It is fairly simple but this is a good thing as that means it will get used. With most tools like this if the average business cannot figure them out in the first 15 minutes they are gone. Clienteq should pass that test.
Clienteq has been well received. It was first presented at TechCrunch DemoPit50 at 2008 under the company name BrightSide Software. Clienteq was a winner at Blogcamp CEE 2008 and was also among the finalists at SVOD 2008.
