Unifyo, a new startup based out of Cambridge, UK, is hoping that the time is right for a single central place to watch and monitor conversations and interactions across social networks and CRM with its platform for creating unified customer profiles. The browser-based tool makes it easy to keep track of conversations no matter where they happen, and to add files and notes to different customers and clients so that users have the most complete picture possible of who it is they’re working with.
With Unifyo, users can connect Twitter, Salesforce, Gmail, Podio and other accounts to feed in additional information about the people they interact with. The service works via a browser extension, so that users can monitor and track people around the web as they interact with them. It’s a bit like Rapportive’s tool for Gmail, which gives users context and social details around the people they email, but tied to personal social media and social CRM accounts, and available everywhere, not just for contacts in Gmail. Unifyo offers two plans, a basic account for $24.99 per month, and a premium account for $49.99 per month (those prices are scheduled to go up to $49.95 and $99.95 in September).
“When we came up with Unifyo, it was all about seeing the trends we have in computing, both in the personal and business worlds,” Unifyo CEO and founder Benjamin Wirtz said in an interview. “A lot of applications are moving to the cloud, and sometimes we can’t even choose if customer data resides in the cloud, if we’re having Twitter conversations or other conversations via social media, so we needed a tool that unified the customer data across the different applications that we’re using at the moment, so Unifyo was our way of bringing that together.”
Having these kinds of customer profiles not located in some central repository, but actually following people around to CRM software and to any browser-based web app via the browser extension, is what makes Unifyo different from a number of similar services, including HootSuite and Radian6. Users can also set their privacy preferences, so that certain accounts will be visible only to them and not to the rest of their team, if they’d rather use some social media sources for personal reasons and others for business.
The variety of decentralized contextual and relevancy information that Unifyo provides to anyone looking to manage customer or other relationships, be they personal or professional, is the way forward for tools that were once basically static, periodically updated databases. Unifyo has clearly been watching what’s working with other tools like Rapportive, and is poised to join other recent startups like SocialPanda in the new wave of always-on tools that work and live where you work, instead of acting as a mostly separate standalone entity.
Unifyo is funded by the Citrix startup accelerator, and plans on raising another angel round later this year. Judging by its mix of cloud-based tech, social media integration and constant, seamless operation within existing business workflows, it’ll likely have no trouble attracting investors.
