3M Improves Sales Force Communication With Palringo Group Messaging and Geo-tagging Capabilities

LONDON, May 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- 3M, the diversified technology company, has launched Palringo's Enterprise Messaging Platform across its 400-strong UK sales team.

By offering a unique, geo-enabled mobile group messaging platform through Palringo's Enterprise Messaging Platform, 3M is providing its sales team with more accurate CRM information, the ability to cross-sell, share information, and easily see which current customers are located nearby. Its aim is to create a more integrated sales organisation, capable of selling bundled solutions that meet customer needs.

Palringo Enterprise Messaging is a dedicated, device- and network-independent service that allows teams to collaborate, communicate and share media regardless of location. It supports P2P and group messaging, handling workgroups of thousands of members and can be used from any handheld device or desktop, requiring only a data connection to work.

3M's sales team represent some 35 business units, so sharing customer information and communicating across groups can present its own challenges.

3M therefore began using Palringo's Enterprise Messaging Platform to facilitate group communication among the sales force. The company also worked with Palringo to help integrate the messaging platform and the CRM system so that conversations, activities and results taking place on the Palringo platform are automatically reflected in 3M's own systems, ensuring information is reliable and up-to-date.

In addition, 3M is using Palringo's group messaging and geo-tagging capabilities to identify customers and their sales contacts by location, allowing any member of the 3M team who happens to find themselves in physical proximity to a customer to "discover" that customer, and find relevant colleagues who can share customer information.

With the launch of Palringo Enterprise Messaging, 3M has provided sales people across the organisation with reliably up-to-date CRM information, even when remote. In addition, the geo-tagged group functionality has made search and discovery within the sales database more effective and proactive.

Said James Simpson, eBusiness Manager for 3M in the UK and Ireland: "Over the years 3M innovations have improved daily life for hundreds of millions of people all over the world, but we are innovative in the way we do business as well.

"Palringo's platform, particularly the ability to create groups around specific customers, locations and business units, provides us with a highly effective way to approach customers with real business solutions. Our sales team has reacted with enthusiasm."

Further information on the Palringo technology

Palringo has developed its own end-to-end telco-grade messaging service with a proprietary protocol designed specifically to enable rich group and P2P communications on any mobile device. The Palringo client works on all major mobile OSes and, should connectivity to third-party services be required, is able to connect to popular IM services such as AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ, Microsoft Messenger and Facebook Chat, and enterprise messaging services.

Using the core Palringo service as a platform allows enterprise users to extend the usual text experience to enable:

- Groups: Palringo's group function is flexible and scalable and can easily accommodate hundreds of individuals within a group

- Location/Geo-tagging: Palringo offers a rich location/presence functionality that adds an additional level of communication in an enterprise setting. The location functionality is flexible in terms of end-user privacy control options, but for enterprise solutions can also be configured in always-on mode. Enterprise users such as 3M also leverage Palringo's location and presence capabilities to geo-tag customer groups, making location information even more useful.

- Voice: A flexible form of push-to-talk messaging that allows users to use their phones like walkie-talkies

- Pictures: Palringo makes it easy to snap a picture on the phone, or select a picture from the on-device album, and drop it into an on-going discussion with an individual or within a group. In a business setting, field engineers can send images of particularly difficult faults to colleagues for comment, or colleagues can share photos from a tradeshow or industry event

- History & Archival: Unlike competitors, Palringo's emphasis on a robust server-side platform allows the company to offer a full history of conversations accessible via the Palringo clients, via an individual user's account page on the web or via an admin control panel for enterprise users. This is particularly important for regulated industries or other environments where the ability to archive IM and text conversations is important or even mandated

About 3M

3M captures the spark of new ideas and transforms them into thousands of ingenious products. Its culture of creative collaboration inspires a never-ending stream of powerful technologies that make life better.

The $27 billion diversified technology company has, since 1902, been creating innovative products that help make the world healthier, safer and more productive. Well known 3M brands include Scotch, Post-it, Scotchgard, Thinsulate and Scotch-Brite.

3M employs some 80,000 people worldwide and has operations in more than 65 countries. The UK and Ireland is home to one of the largest 3M subsidiaries outside the USA, employing more than 3,500 people across 19 locations, including 10 manufacturing sites.

Products manufactured in the UK include coated abrasives, occupational health and environmental safety equipment, adhesive tapes, industrial microbiology products, drug delivery systems, high-performance coatings, secure documents and passport scanners. For more information, visit http://www.3M.co.uk or follow @3MNews on Twitter.

About Palringo

Founded in 2006, the UK and San Francisco-based Palringo has built a new type of mobile communication solution that takes the PC-based instant messaging experience and makes it uniquely mobile. With more than five million users sending tens of billions of messages monthly, the company has built a hardened, scalable system that delivers a compelling user experience to the consumer and a valuable communications tool to the enterprise. For more information, visit http://www.palringo.com

    
    For further information, please contact: 

    Will Gardiner
    itpr
    +44(0)1932-578-800