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Home » The tale of a developer, a periscope, and Vtiger’s One View

The tale of a developer, a periscope, and Vtiger’s One View

It is not every day that a light bulb goes on, and we experience a eureka moment, but then not everyone is as brilliant as Archimedes or Nikola Tesla.
Of course, once in a while, mere mortals like you and I do have moments of brilliance, even if a Hollywood movie inspires them. The story goes that Q was watching a movie with submarines in it. And as he observed the periscope rising out of the water and turning 360 degrees to view the surroundings, he had his eureka moment.

Building a feature in Vtiger CRM, that could give a 360-degree view of a customer on a single screen!

When the idea was tabled, there was a flood of questions. Is that even possible? How many modules would need to be integrated to pull up information on a single screen? Can this data be duplicated across different modules so different people can view the same information? Would our clients benefit from a feature like this? And finally, would it be viable enough to invest so many man-hours into a single feature?

But then the culture at Vtiger is that we often start looking at the solution, the moment doubts are beginning to form. So we started building a new feature from the ground up around the periscope theory. And we called it One View.


Are there similar features in the CRM space? Sure there are many, but let us see how One View stands apart from the others.


Other Companies: Give you fragmented views of customer data.

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Remember those calls you received from customer care reps wanting to know if you want a credit card or want to open a bank account? And in most cases, you would have already held an account with them! Or when you paid your phone bill a little late and ended up sharing the transaction number with different billing guys because their system was not updated?
So why does this happen? It happens because the information is not updated and displayed on a single platform. The market is riddled with CRM products that provide fragmented data, data that is spread over different modules or applications used by different teams in the same organization.


And how do they get you to see customer information all in one place? Easy – they will tell you to buy another app that will stitch together, and display data obtained from all these other apps.
Phew…just thinking about it makes us tired.

Vtiger: Gives you all the information about a customer in one place through One View.


The core philosophy of Vtiger is one customer – one product – one view! We believe that all companies should be able to view relevant information for a customer in one place.

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Let us consider a pre-sale scenario to see how One View works.


Imagine you have received an inquiry about a product. Before you meet or set up a call with the customer, what is the data you will want to review – the product they are interested in, product pricing, purchase history, the key decision-makers? Well, you can use One view to collate all this data and more.
You can, in fact, look at how the customer has engaged with your company – past issues (tickets), etc. In case the customer asks to speak at a later time, you can create an appointment instantaneously. That is our One View based on the periscope theory – giving you a view of your surroundings with relevant information. With One View, you can get up to speed on everything about the customer with only a few clicks.


See, it will now be a piece of cake to converse and close a deal with a customer. After all, you won’t be wasting time jumping back and forth between apps and different screens looking for information. Neither would you be asking other teams if they have updated their records.

Now let us consider a post-sale scenario.


Assume your company sells industrial refrigerators and has received a bulk order. Your sales team would have had discussions, created deals and quotes, given discounts, and even provided post-sales support. And they would have entered all this information in Vtiger CRM.
The next summer, your customer would have called Support about a faulty refrigerator. Your field technician visits the site and, in the process, identifies requirements for additional products that can be sourced from your company. They can immediately use One View to access customer records and create a deal from the case record itself. They can take notes and alert the sales team about customer requirements


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Since the sales team will be able to see all the details, including notes of the requirements, they can easily take it forward and initiate a conversation to close the deal. All with the aid of a few clicks.
We assure you that you won’t be spending time interacting with other teams or opening applications to find relevant information. And you will also have access to updated data on hand. Now, doesn’t that add value to your workspace!


But what if the support or maintenance team did not have a feature like One View in their mobile CRM? Or if they had captured the details in a different app than the one used by the sales team? Well, in that case, the following would have happened:

  • Identifying relevant account managers and passing on the information would have been time-consuming.
  • The information would have been lying in the database for a long time until someone would revisit it.
  • And in a few cases, the new business opportunity would have been entirely lost.

Don’t lose your way to a new deal. Sign up for your free trial version today to see how One View works! You will be pleasantly surprised.


And lastly, does One View have a definitive edge over similar features available in the market? Well, when we showcased One View at the last Gartner IT Symposium (Goa, Nov 2019), our competitors did walk over to us (repeatedly, if we might add) and asked to see a demo. Some of us at Vtiger are still preening…


Oh, by the way, Q is a fictitious name, though the story is real.


Click here to sign up for your free trial version today and check out One View.