Wintouch: Offering a Feature-Rich Low-Code Application Builder

The IBM i (AS/400, iSeries) is arguably one of the most successful, scalable, and secure application platforms ever introduced. Many ERP, homegrown, and vertical applications still thrive on IBM i. Integrating Cloud-based CRM with existing IBM i applications, however, demands IBM i expertise and considerable time, effort, and financial investment. That’s where Wintouch makes a difference.

Touchtone Corporation developed Wintouch CRM originally as a native IBM AS/400 application that would easily integrate with any native ERP, homegrown, or vertical application. After different iterations, Wintouch became a cloud-based solution containing a set of native IBM i (AS/400, iSeries) integration modules. Fast-forward to today, its integration modules combined with Touchtone's expertise on the IBM i platform and native applications ensure a well-integrated and cost-effective solution.

The Wintouch development and support teams, with over 35 years of experience on this IBM platform, deliver live integrations. This includes customer transactions such as ERP invoices, orders, shipments, and payments.

They are passed on to Wintouch to create custom reports and reflect accurate metrics and timely automation triggers and actions. The integrations also encompass prospect/opportunity information flows into ERP to set up a new customer, and quotes generated in Wintouch are turned into orders in ERP.

Unleashing the Power of System Integration

Touchtone has continued to improve Wintouch based on customer feedback, market demand, and new technology. Today, its flexible data structure and features adapt to clients’ business and organizational needs via a highly custom implementation process.

"Wintouch has been a stable and increasingly feature-rich Cloud CRM for us. It is well-integrated with CMS running on our on-premise IBM i, and Touchtone's highly competent support team continually goes the extra mile to adapt to our evolving needs"

“We developed Wintouch based on our belief that only a well-integrated solution can yield the full benefits of implementing CRM. Our solution ensures that clients obtain user acceptance and project success in a seamless manner,” says John Parpala, Wintouch’s Support Manager.

Fostering a Collaborative Work Environment
Wintouch is a single, customizable solution for a suite of business functions that reduces the need for multiple subscriptions and costly integrations. It includes all the tools within a web browser to define a new database structure, design the user interface, and build logic, workflow, automation, templates, reporting, and dashboards for the new objects and fields. Wintouch’s features foster a collaborative work environment, improve efficiency through automation, and enable the visualization of KPIs. It is highly customizable and scales as clients grow.

One can build a sales commission tracking and management application within a few hours. Wintouch administrators can create top-level objects with as many subobject levels as needed and set up user groups and roles to ensure proper user access and user interface. The supported field types are text, number, date, date-time, time, text area, currency, phone, email, URL, checkbox, radio group, picklist (static, dynamic, and cascading), multi-select, lookup, and image.

Helping Capture Leads and Track Products Seamlessly

In a recent scenario, a client of Wintouch faced challenges with their online catalog, which featured products and parts on their website. This catalog collected leads for distinct paid services but lacked integration with their ERP system. To address this issue, they opted to transition to the Wintouch WordPress plugin.

By implementing the Wintouch WordPress plugin, the client now efficiently captures leads and monitors product views associated with each lead. The system ensures that leads are cross-checked against the existing customer and lead database to prevent duplicates. Furthermore, it automatically generates new contacts and opportunities for existing leads or customers. The system also intelligently assigns new leads to the appropriate sales team member based on geographic location, streamlining the lead management process and enhancing overall efficiency.

We developed Wintouch based on our belief that only a well-integrated solution can yield the full benefits of implementing CRM. Our solution ensures that clients obtain user acceptance and project success in a seamless manner.

The sales rep follows a semi-automated workflow to qualify leads effectively. This process culminates in the creation of a quote, which can be effortlessly generated into a PDF format and promptly sent to the respective contact with a single click. Furthermore, the system streamlines follow-up activities by automatically scheduling them, ensuring timely lead engagement. Every email communication is automatically logged within the system, providing visibility to other team members.

This transparent approach enhances collaboration, facilitating informed decision-making across the sales team. Wintouch dashboards provide live metrics on the sales pipeline plus sales data from ERP (broken down by product, customers, year, etc.) to the sales team and the executives. They now have a well-integrated sales process that covers both new and recurring sales, free of the issues that arise from multiple, non-integrated services. Immediate cost savings are achieved through the elimination of other paid services.

Offering Relevant Role-Specific Data

Another customer used Wintouch with ERP integration to build a central workspace for various departments: sales, inside sales, executive, customer service, technical support, accounting, quality assurance, training, and human resources. This enabled the client to have complete visibility of every customer and maintain better customer relationships.

Each department's communications and activities are made transparent to other relevant departments, subject to permissions, and are housed within its dedicated homepage and account dashboards. These dashboards showcase role-specific data pertinent to each department's responsibilities and objectives.

Automated alerts are deployed to promptly notify interdisciplinary teams of critical situations. For instance, when a technical support representative logs a ticket for a product defect, the system triggers an email alert to both their management team and a member of the quality assurance team.

This plays a vital role in swift and coordinated responses to sensitive issues, facilitating effective collaboration and resolution across departments. The quality assurance team can review the ticket and any communications with the customer about the issue and track similar tickets to determine if a product modification is needed. The account's sales rep can also review support tickets along with sales trends before their periodic in-person visits to ensure they're knowledgeable about the entire customer experience.

Fostering a Reliable and Efficient Workflow

Apart from its top-notch product, the company also has a knowledgeable team. Most of the company’s highly skilled software developers and engineers have been with it for more than a decade. It believes that the quality and reliability of its software are a result of the time and effort staff has invested in it.

“Our talent retention has fostered a reliable and efficient workflow between our development and support staff, allowing us to deliver complex implementations quickly and cost-effectively,” says Parpala.

From requirements and specifications to coding, testing, and deployment, Wintouch’s software engineers and support staff are experts at delivering sound technology built to improve the efficiency of your day-to-day business processes.

"Our talent retention has fostered a reliable and efficient workflow between our development and support staff, allowing us to deliver complex implementations quickly and cost-effectively."

Using Wintouch for Internal Operations

Small, medium, large, and multinational companies have used Wintouch for years. Some began with only a few users and then expanded to hundreds of users and many departments. Also, Touchtone Corporation uses Wintouch to manage its development efforts, sales opportunities, implementation projects, and customer support.

“Wintouch ensures excellent customer satisfaction. It can deliver the same benefits to IBM i customers and help them leverage their significant hardware/software/human resources investment in this platform,” says Parpala.

Having established a reputation for delivering powerful software solutions and outstanding customer support, Touchtone aims to build a variety of custom cloud applications for businesses and organizations of various sizes. The ultimate aim is to increase the efficiency of clients’ businesses by centralizing and automating multiple aspects of their organizations today and in the future.