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Tungsten Network Selects NewVoiceMedia as Contact Centre Partner to Transform Service Experience for Global Customer Base

NewVoiceMedia, a leading provider of cloud contact centre and inside sales solutions, announced today that Tungsten Network has selected its NVM Platform to better serve its global customer-base by delivering exceptional, emotive experiences.

Tungsten Network, a secure business transaction network, signed an agreement with NewVoiceMedia to provide a state-of-the-art experience for its 300,000 customers in 192 countries, while improving its sales performance, operational efficiencies and team productivity. Following a market evaluation, the company replaced technology from ShoreTel with NewVoiceMedia’s platform, for its Salesforce integration, call recording and reporting capabilities, together with its global call routing architecture, Global Voice Assurance (GVA).

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Salesforce CTI integration is central to the NVM Platform, enabling businesses like Tungsten Network to create customer experiences that help them serve better and sell more. NewVoiceMedia’s solution integrates effectively, for better access to rich customer data, from which agents can make personal connections through every channel.

With GVA, Tungsten Network can route calls using the most efficient path, ensuring clear voice quality by making use of the telephony infrastructure local to the caller and the agent. The company can easily overflow calls between regions to reduce customer wait time and maximise customer service levels, while reporting can also be consolidated and simplified, giving the business a global or local view of performance statistics and reducing administrative overheads.

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Kevin Braim, Head of Technical Operations at Tungsten Network, comments, “We wanted to improve our customer experience by deploying cloud contact centre technology with crystal clear voice quality and efficient Salesforce integration, as part of our long-term strategy. We are looking forward to enhancing our customer satisfaction with NewVoiceMedia’s cloud contact centre platform, to deliver exceptional customer experiences, across our global business”.

Chris Haggis, SVP Customer Success at NewVoiceMedia, adds, “We are now living and working in the Age of Customer Experience where organisations are increasingly being defined by customer delight. We are pleased to have been selected as an important partner of Tungsten Network as it seeks to compete on customer experience and I look forward to seeing the company make this transformation for its growing customer base”.

Read More: Interview with Anil Kaul, CEO at Absolutdata

Decoding the Superpower of Programmatic for Digital Ad Sales

Programmatic Advertising technologies have fundamentally transformed media buying and performance marketing from an efficiency standpoint. 

How do programmatic advertising strategies help push the ceiling for digital sales? We spoke to Bill Alena, recently-hired CRO of Kiip to understand the connection between programmatic technologies and revenue generation in the digital advertising industry.

Tell us about your journey into sales and revenue management in the digital advertising industry.

I got my start in sales with DoubleClick on its digital ad sales team in 1998 building the industry’s first ad networks. Most recently, I served as CRO at The Meet Group, a Kiip partner and one of the largest mobile publisher networks in the world, with $150 million in projected annual revenue. As CRO, I oversaw a global direct sales team, programmatic ad operations, design, marketing, business development and project management for the company. I was also responsible for monetizing all ad inventory and sales across The Meet Group’s network of apps and sites, which encompasses more than 20 million monthly active users and 15 billion ad impressions.

Would adoption of Programmatic technologies help revenue generation teams with higher productivity/ audience targeting?

Yes.

That’s the superpower of programmatic. These technologies have fundamentally transformed media buying and performance marketing from an efficiency standpoint, and we’ve never had access to better audience targeting than we do today. That said, while programmatic is rapidly becoming the default mode for digital advertising, there are still instances where the hands-on attention received through a managed buy makes a lot of sense. Ultimately, marketers need to find a strategic mix that’s going to best drive their KPIs.

What inspired you to join Kiip?

The Kiip team is amazing. The people are knowledgeable, hardworking and committed to the company. With that team, Kiip is building some of the industry’s best tech to support in-app programmatic. I’m very excited to take this new technology into the marketplace and heavily expand the programmatic arm of Kiip.

Which sales practices and theories have you often relied on to train your revenue generation and business development teams?

As a sales team, we are at our core here to support our buyers. I find we ultimately end up with more business when we put our focus on the needs of the customer, and I make that virtue a priority in all sales teams I lead.

How is the US Mobile Ad Tech different today than when you first started in the industry?

The mobile adtech space has evolved immensely in the past five years alone. The industry is in a constant state of evolution. Recently, in-app programmatic has probably seen the most change. As an industry, we went from a handful of small networks with poorly adapted desktop ad servers, to entirely self-sufficient and growing ecosystem. Our goal as a company will be to be on the leading edge of this evolving technology.

What makes US adtech industry so competitive in sales compared to the European market?

Larger programmatic budgets in the US have compelled greater competition here versus what we’re seeing in the European market.

How do you work with data science, process automation, enterprise planning, and advanced analytics?

At Kiip, we are currently building an exchange platform (Moments Exchange) to manage data and ad automation. It’s a very impressive system that will change the direction the industry evolves.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a sales tech champion?

As mentioned earlier, adtech is in a constant flux, and it’s important to be on the forefront. We need to stay on top of the AI trends and make choices on how and when is best to integrate. You’ll have to place some bets on how it will evolve. We just need to put in our due diligence and do everything in our power to make sure those bets pay off.

Thank you, Bill, for chatting with us about your vision into Programmatic technologies for ad sales!

Greenfly names Kerri Pollard as Chief Revenue Officer

Former President of CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) brings success in driving revenue growth and building high-performing digital teams

Greenfly, a community collaboration platform that helps companies tell their authentic brand stories at scale, today announced the hiring of Kerri Pollard as the company’s Chief Revenue Officer.

With extensive experience in building industry-leading, worldwide platforms in the digital marketing arena, Pollard’s addition to the executive team will support Greenfly’s growth across industries and expansion of its sales, marketing and customer success teams. Prior to Greenfly, Pollard was the Chief Revenue Officer at shopping technology platform Honey and President at performance marketing network CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction).

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Pollard noted, “Generating original content at scale is one of the biggest challenges that marketers face when executing upon their social media strategy. Authenticity is key to consumer engagement, but how does a brand create, curate and post such content consistently and easily? Over the past four years, Greenfly has helped an incredible portfolio of brands address this challenge with their impressive platform. As we significantly expand Greenfly’s outreach efforts, I’m excited to help even more brands recognize success in this arena.”

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Pollard’s appointment comes as Greenfly continues its rapid growth in enabling the efficient creation and distribution of timely, authentic and on-brand digital content. In January, the software company raised $8.5 million in Series B funding, bringing Greenfly’s total funding to date to $14.7 million.

“We are thrilled to welcome Kerri to Greenfly. She has tremendous experience building deep relationships with brands and scaling sophisticated sales and customer support operations,” said Daniel Kirschner, CEO of Greenfly. “These are exactly the leadership skills we need as we continue to grow to meet the vast opportunities before us.”

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Workato Finds 5x Growth in Companies Using Slack as Workflow Hub

Workato, the leading intelligent integration and automation platform, today announced its number of paid users utilizing Slack for their enterprise workflows increased 5x from 2017 to 2018, according to new user data just released.

“Companies have moved far beyond just receiving app notifications and taking simple actions in Slack,” said Workato CEO, Vijay Tella. “They would like to enable their employees to get most of their work done in Slack without having to app hop and deal with fragments of data in dozens of business apps. This requires companies to think about enabling workflows across all of these applications from Slack.”

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

Today, enterprises large and small are using Workato and Slack together for a wide variety of purposes, including:

  • ChatOps: managing and provisioning virtual machines, self-service security checkups and operations, incident management and escalation
  • Intelligent Helpdesk: supporting employees and customers
  • Secure Approval Workflows: Sales Deal Desk, PTO approvals, Expense approvals
  • Revenue Ops: getting complete customer context across all touchpoints and systems and optimizing marketing and sales processes

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Workato also reports that its platform now contains 380,000 Slack recipes — what Workato calls its integrations and automations. Workato also disclosed its intelligent automation platform has now processed more than 1 billion events between Slack and other applications.

“We made the switch from Hipchat to Slack and wanted to enable employees to do work in our chat app,” said Bill Olson, Director of Field Product Management at Tenable. “When we analyzed all of our employees’ requests for help, 90% of them had an answer already written down.  Instead of having humans point people to the right answer, we wanted to create a system where you could go into Slack and ask a question, and it would give you the answer. We were able to create a smart help desk inside of Slack, and Workato is the platform that enables us to do work from Slack.”

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

Other examples of companies using Slack as their work hub include:

Chat as the new UI isn’t only limited to Slack.  During the past 12 months, companies using Microsoft Teams grew 3x on the Workato platform, which now features over 14,000 Microsoft Teams recipes.

“If you had told me 10 years ago when I was working on middleware at Tibco and Oracle that integration would become the core capability that transforms chat apps into the console where employees get all their work done, I don’t know if I would have believed you,” said Tella. “But the kinds of complex workflows you can orchestrate using chat apps like Slack and Teams as the command center is absolutely incredible. We’re excited to be the platform that people are using to do this.”

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Planday Announces Series C Fundraising of $40 Million U.S. Dollars

Will expand U.S. operations to support tremendous market growth across restaurants, care homes and security

Planday, the workforce collaboration platform, has announced today that it has closed its Round C fundraising of $40 million U.S. dollars. The lead investor is Nordic financial services group, SEB Private Equity, with additional investment from investors in previous funding rounds, including Creandum and Idinvest. This investment will be used both to extend the platform and to accelerate expansion into new markets across Europeand North America, particularly in the U.S., where the Company experienced 90% growth in 2017.

Planday, which is part of Apple’s Mobility Partner Program and the recently launched integrated iOS solution with Lightspeed and Intuit Quickbooks, will use the latest round of financing to expand growth across its key areas of focus in the U.S. region including restaurants & hospitality, fitness, retail, security and care homes. In addition, the Company plans to open a new office in Los Angeles, CA this October to build out its sales force and support partnership opportunities.

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In the UK, where it is estimated that 26% of all work is shift-based, Planday is growing its user base at over 250% annually. This investment will also enable Planday to establish a UK-based technology development hub, as well as to grow sales and customer support teams from its London office. Over the last year alone, Planday has quadrupled its UK employee base and is positioned to become the company’s most significant hub.

Planday has developed a flexible rota scheduling platform that can be used by businesses managing shift workers to enable real-time, contextual communication between employees, managers and co-workers in industries that have been traditionally underserved by technological solutions.

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Christian Brøndum, Chief Executive Officer for Planday commented: “We are proud to collaborate with a broad global customer base, including brands such as Barry’s Bootcamp, Ottolenghi, and St Pancras Hotel. This investment will further enable us to help customers automate their business processes and save administrative time through our partnerships with industry leaders such as Apple, Lightspeed, Intuit and Sage. Our mission is to deliver fully integrated solutions that provide a seamless experience for our customers.”

Planday allows businesses to optimise administration of employees and integrate seamlessly into their payroll processes. Planday’s customer base already spans 39 countries, and this investment will enable further global expansion, as the broader market is predicted to reach over $130 billion in value by 2020 worldwide.

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Victor Lang, Chief Investment Officer at SEB Private Equity, adds to this, “we have backed companies in several traditional industries that have been revolutionized by cloud-based SaaS technology. We believe Planday is well positioned to spearhead automation and simplicity within workforce management, which is why we are excited to lead this round of funding for Planday, as well as team up with the Planday management team to continue scaling new ways of collaboration for shift-based businesses.”

Johan Brenner, General Partner at Creandum and Chairman of the board for Planday commented: “We are as excited to invest in Planday as we were to invest in iZettle and Spotify. We can see a huge market opportunity for Planday as they continue to grow internationally to improve the lives of 1 billion shift workers across the globe. Planday paves the way for a digital revolution for shift workers and their managers.”

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

Narvar Raises $30 Million Series C Funding Round as Global Brands Increase Investment in Customer Loyalty and Engagement

More than 500 global retailers rely on Narvar to deliver world-class customer engagement to 300 million consumers worldwide

Narvar, the premium post-purchase customer engagement platform, today announced a $30 million Series C financing round led by Accel, who also led Narvar’s Series A round. Existing investors including Battery Ventures participated in the round, as well as new investors Salesforce Ventures and Scale Venture Partners. In conjunction with the financing, Ryan Sweeney, partner at Accel, will join Narvar’s board. Since its founding in 2012, Narvar has raised $64 million in total funding.

“Accel has proudly been a Narvar partner from the start, and has watched the company’s customer adoption, product innovation, employee culture and global market traction continue to flourish,” said Sweeney. “Over the last few years, Narvar has redefined e-commerce service standards by changing the way brands interact with their customers throughout the entire online purchase lifecycle. We’re confident the company will continue to play a key role in shaping the future of online retail experiences and we’re looking forward to continuing to support Amit and the rest of the team on this mission.”

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Experts predict that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Traditionally, retailers have been obsessed with acquisition and conversion, often neglecting the post-purchase phase of the journey. Narvar helps brands to engage customers at a time of high anticipation and build long-term loyalty with their customers.

By working with more than 500 of the world’s most admired retailers, including Patagonia, Gap, Levi’s, TUMI and Sephora, Narvar has created the industry standard for addressing the post-purchase opportunity. Narvar’s robust, intelligent and customized SaaS platform provides powerful delivery tracking analytics, delivery notifications, returns management, seamless feedback collection and timely customer communications. The company has served nearly 5 billion customer interactions across 38 countries and 50 languages.

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“When we started Narvar just a few years ago, we set out to simplify the everyday lives of customers,” said Amit Sharma, founder and CEO, Narvar. “We recognized a huge opportunity for brands to deliver exceptional post-purchase customer engagement, and have helped retailers realize this vision for more than 300 million people. At the same time, e-commerce adoption has skyrocketed — in fact, more than 70 percent of adults online have interacted with Narvar through the retailers we support, and we anticipate this will continue trending up. We’ll use this new investment to continue developing leading products for our customers while investing heavily in international growth to support global brands.”

“Growing our direct-to-consumer business is a priority for us not only financially, but also strategically as it allows us to engage with a customer long-term and ensure the interactions are on-brand,” said Charlie Cole, chief digital officer at TUMI. “Differentiating the post-purchase experience represents one of the primary areas where brands can win against the major marketplace players, as it provides an opportunity to delight a customer and build long-term loyalty. Narvar has been an excellent partner for us in accomplishing both goals – driving thoughtful brand interactions and exemplary post-purchase services via their platform.”

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With this new round of funding, Narvar will ramp up product innovation and R&D efforts while aggressively hiring to support its growing offices around the world. In the last 12 months, Narvar has doubled revenue and employee headcount, deepened its executive bench, and added more than 100 brands, including Costco and Lululemon, to its roster of customers. The company has also expanded its global footprint into APAC and EMEA —  opening a Londonoffice and making its first leadership hires in Germany.

Narvar is trusted by over 600 carriers and 500 leading brands across industries including apparel, health and beauty, housewares, mass merchants, home improvement, and electronics. With Narvar, retailers realize additional revenue and lower shipping and returns-related contact volume by an average of 30 percent within days. Consumers who interact with Narvar-powered brands report being highly satisfied with their post-purchase experience.

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Inte Q Continues Commitment to Growth and Increasing CRM and Loyalty Expertise with New EVP Stephanie Kiley

Inte Q, a leading provider of CRM and loyalty programs, is pleased to announce the appointment of Stephanie Kiley as its Executive Vice President of Client Solution Delivery. Kiley brings extensive client-side and agency experience to Inte Q, having led complex engagements for some of the worlds’ largest brands, including a global fast food franchise and a leading insurance brand with more than $35B in annual revenues.

With a disciplined approach to developing CRM and loyalty solutions, Inte Q provides the strategic direction brands need to engage and strengthen customer relationships.

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The addition of Kiley along with upcoming advancements in technology will enable streamlined delivery of CRM strategies, loyalty programs, advanced analytics and omni-channel marketing, allowing Inte Q to deliver its service offerings to additional brands.

“We pride ourselves on being incredibly responsive to the needs of our clients. Stephanie will have an immediate and measurable impact on delivering successful solutions for our clients,” said Jeff Harris, CEO of Inte Q.

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“It’s exciting to bring Stephanie on board at this point in Inte Q’s growth. I look forward to adding her expertise to the long-tenured account management and client services teams to build upon our existing knowledge. She will bring new technologies and processes, enabling Inte Q to continue to provide valuable services and solutions to our clients,” stated Terry McCarthy, President of Inte Q.

Kiley is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a degree in Computer Engineering, and a graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with a Master’s in Business Administration.

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Jane.ai Adds HubSpot Integration to Provide Customers Easier Access to Platform Intelligence

Jane.ai artificial-intelligence chatbot gives HubSpot users more flexibility and provides support needed to maximize marketing, sales and customer service efforts

Jane.ai, the first truly AI-Powered Teammate designed for the workplace, officially announced today that starting September 1, Jane.ai will release a HubSpot integration to provide users of HubSpot, the leading inbound marketing and sales growth platform, with more flexibility and instant access to the platform’s intelligence.

As organizations rely on more and more tools, employees are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information stored across the various apps, platforms and databases they use to do their jobs. According to HubSpot, 32% of sales reps spend over an hour a day on data entry maintenance with CRM systems that are difficult to navigate. Through the Jane.ai integration, HubSpot users can now source information without ever having to leave the conversational interfaces they use to communicate with their teammates – helping HubSpot users to be more efficient and productive, ultimately saving resources and dollars.

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“When we learned how Jane.ai is automating and improving the workday, we knew she’d be a great fit for HubSpot customers,” said HubSpot Chief Strategy Officer Brad Coffey. “Jane’s HubSpot integration will bring our customers instant, on-the-go access to critical bits of intel from across our Marketing, Sales and Service Hubs, within the channel customers are already using to communicate with their teams. That increased flexibility and access will make it even easier for our customers to achieve their unique business goals.”

HubSpot has also selected Jane.ai to be one of 12 startups featured at Startup Central at this year’s Inbound Conference, September 4th – 7th at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center.

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Jane connects all of an organization’s siloed information across platforms, apps, teams and databases, and surfaces information through a real-time, conversational interface. When an inquiry is posed to Jane, she connects to the company’s cloud-based apps, mines information from docs and learns the team’s tribal knowledge to provide instant responses. Additionally, as Jane is fully integrated into a variety of the most used workplace communication platforms, including Slack and Skype, there is virtually zero learning curve for most users. For example, a HubSpot user can simply ask Jane, “What is the status of the ACME deal?” or “Show stats for the Halloween landing page” and an accurate response is returned in mere seconds.

“We’re proud to integrate with HubSpot to make it easier for its users to get exactly what they need, when they need it,” said David Karandish, CEO and Founder of Jane.ai. “With the help of Jane, HubSpot users can now tap into the power of their HubSpot data from anywhere, on-the-fly; imagine being able to look up the CTR on an email from an Uber, or the status of the ACME account while walking into a meeting.”

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Katherine Kostereva, CEO and Managing Partner at bpm’online, Recognized Among the Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2018

Bpm’online, a global business software company leading in the space of business process automation and CRM, is excited to announce that Katherine Kostereva, CEO and Managing Partner of bpm’online, has been recognized among the Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2018 by The SaaS Report, a reputable online platform for business news, investment activity and corporate actions related to the SaaS and software sectors.

The SaaS Report has selected CEOs based on the detailed reviews they received from the contenders’ respective employees and industry peers. CEOs were assessed across a number of key areas including integrity, intelligence, energy, company culture, and company growth, among other areas. The experts from The SaaS Report have received nearly 5,000 nominations on behalf of hundreds of CEOs and thoroughly evaluated the comments employees and colleagues submitted about a CEO’s particular strengths as well as improvement areas.

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As stated in the list: “Katherine Kostereva received over 240 nominations from the colleagues in the Top 50 SaaS CEOs process accompanied by volumes of notable comments highlighting her effectiveness as an exceptional leader.”

Katherine Kostereva co-founded the company knowing that organizations can’t have excellent customer relationships without powerful business processes. Throughout more than 15 years of operation under Katherine Kostereva’s strong leadership, the company has grown from a start-up of five people to a leading business process automation and CRM software company.

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Bpm’online’s intelligent platform accelerates sales, marketing, service, and operations for thousands of customers and hundreds of partners worldwide and is highly recognized as a market leader by key industry analysts.

“I am very pleased to receive such a recognition, as this is the award from the whole bpm’online community – our customers, partners, and peers from all over the world I am lucky to work with. I am proud that bpm’online helps organizations all over the world be equipped to respond to ever-changing demands of the accelerating world, and this recognition once again proves that we’re on the right track!” – commented Katherine Kostereva.

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Introhive and Manzama Announce Partnership to Bring Faster Market Intelligence to the Professional Services Industry

Introhive and Manzama today announced a partnership which enables seamless integration of Manzama’s market intelligence insights into Introhive’s relationship intelligence platform for professional service organizations.

The integration allows organizations to bring in key information provided by the Manzama Intelligence Platform directly into Introhive’s Pre-Meeting Digest, an automated client briefing report delivered via email, for better access and utilization by employees and teams across the firm.

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This integration encompasses not only information from the Manzama Base Platform, but also from Manzama’s Insights product, which leverages the latest in data science techniques to uncover risks and opportunities around clients, prospects, and industry sectors.

“We are thrilled to partner with Introhive and to bring together two of the leading business intelligence solutions for organizations around the globe,” said Mark Hinkle, co-founder of Manzama. “Combining many of the key insights that Manzama makes available into the easily digestible framework that the Introhive solution provides will now make it even easier for busy professionals to quickly understand and ascertain important developments happening with their clients and prospects, and any other important issue or topic that they need to stay informed about.”

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“In today’s changing and competitive landscape, professional services firms are looking for innovative ways to scale business development and marketing functions within the firm,” explains Adam Draper, Vice President at Introhive. “Our partnership with Manzama is really exciting, as their market intelligence solution is a natural fit with Introhive’s Pre-Meeting Digest reports. Professionals now have access to leading market intelligence provided by Manzama right in their email digests alongside other key client information from CRM, time and billing, matter management and other business systems.”

When combined, the two platforms deliver key information where and when professionals need it most. Firm’s today that are leveraging CRM, Manzama and Introhive have access to a true insights platform with little to no extra effort required.

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