X2CRM 2016 Roadmap and Customer Success Showcase

With the start of a new year I would like to take a moment to do a quick recap of 2015 and to share our plans for 2016. Before I start I realize that you many not be that interested to know how we create, build and manage X2CRM software and cloud services. Perhaps being a smaller software company with a very high ratio of software developers it is easy for us/me to get very feature vs solution focused. I know I have gotten a little too specific with features and have not also provided more business focused guidance and real world customer examples on how to unleash the power of X2CRM to dramatically impact your customer relationship management goals. 

X2CRM 5.0 released in late 2014 with our latest update 5.4 last week culminated over five years of continuous software and cloud systems development. When you start something from scratch with a very, very large CRM platform ambition it does take a more than a few years to build a long term foundation. Today, five years later I am incredibly pleased with the way that X2CRM has matured into a truly global enterprise CRM platform for small business. While you could say living in two different worlds, one open source and the other a commercial software company, it has been amazing to see X2CRM open source grow to over 24,000 installations around the globe, and also to see our commercial products X2Professional, X2Platinum and X2VPS cloud services grow to over 400+ customers in less then three years. 

Today X2CRM is different company then we were five years ago. Instead of focusing solely on software development, our time and interest is now more focused on customer success. Now ‘customer success’ is perhaps a little too marketing in its general use. Building a CRM platform for small business has allowed us to work with a lot of interesting CEO’s and executives across many businesses types, industries, verticals spanning the globe – with over 60% of our customers residing outside the US. So, one of my real focuses for this year is to share interesting X2CRM customer success stories in order to show how many different ways you can use X2CRM for your business. By building a CRM platform I think we may get lost in the platform while the really exciting action is out on the race track – customer deployments. 

To start I would like to invite you to join us for a very, very interesting joint webinar with one of our go-to services partners, AdvantageCRM. X2CRM and AdvantageCRM have been working together for several years now so we thought it might be interesting to highlight a customer in the healthcare insurance industry. In the USA over the last few years our medical insurance industry has gone through massive changes due to new government legislation. Traditionally medical insurance brokers would sell to companies directly who managed medical plans for their employees. So a broker could have thirty accounts with 100-2000 employees per account. Today, employees can buy their medical insurance directly which means for brokers they have to go from having a relationship with 30 key accounts to over 3000 direct employees. This has turned out to be a big problem for brokers to manage both corporate and individual medical insurance accounts efficiency and profitably. 

David Parker, President of Parker Insurance has graciously agreed to share his story as an owner of an insurance agency and how he has deployed X2CRM to take advantage of this opportunity. I believe the lessons of David’s customer case study apply to many other business types as well. I hope you will join us by registering for this webinar at http://www.getcrm.net. 

Secondly I would to share your experience with other X2CRM users. As a small software company we have worked to best optimize our software and cloud systems development processes to deliver a very powerful, enterprise grade CRM platform but priced for the budgets of smaller businesses. There is no better validation for X2CRM than through real customer examples. If you would be willing to provide a quote, or perhaps a short case study of how your use X2CRM for your business please send me an email at john@x2engine.com. 

To finish up and to provide a road map for 2016, we are planning to release one final X2CRM 5.4.4 update in the next three weeks. This update features a new X2Touch iOS mobile application, new website visitor tracker controls to make is easier to work with https websites, Microsoft Windows Server support and customer reported issues and enhancement requests.

We have started to development on X2CRM 6.0 with betas starting in May of this year. This is going to be a significant release with a ton of new features and enhancements. I will send out an update with specific features and benefits as we finalize the release over the next few weeks. 

From all of us here at X2CRM, I would like to thank you for another great year. I hope you will join us in sharing your X2CRM story with us.