7 Mashups Every Company Needs

Based upon JackBe's customer implementations and market research, here are seven mashups every company needs. Perhaps your organization doesn't need these exact mashups but odds are there are mashups that can help your company's customer service, sales, employee, competitive and community efforts.

1. Customer Service: Mashup your call center application with package tracking

Give your call center reps immediate access to order status and package tracking, both in the same view, instead of forcing them to toggle between different interfaces. Mash up your order management system with logistics information from UPS or FedEx. This would lower call times and raise customer satisfaction at the same time. You can even add Google Maps to visualize order status.

2. Client Prospecting: Mashup your sales prospects with external news, stock and company information.

Feeding your sales representatives with current information about their prospects is critical. You likely subscribe to a variety of services - such as Dun & Bradstreet corporate ratings and Bloomberg news -and you also often use Google for news and financial information. Imagine a mashup that combined all of this prospect data with contact information and engagement history from your CRM system.

3. Human Resources: Mashup your internal job postings with external resume services

HR managers struggle with the volume of resumes sent directly to their companies, yet still miss excellent candidates whose resumes are posted on external job sites like Monster.com and social networks like LinkedIn. Create a mashup that collects resumes for your key open positions and displays them based on relevant job titles, keywords, even candidate zip codes. This dramatically improves candidate sourcing and gives you a real-time look at the available talent market, leading to better-crafted job descriptions and requirements.

4. Competitive: Mashup your competitive position in the marketplace.

There is a vast wealth of publicly available information about your competition - key announcements, news, financial performance, partnering and business development, even speeches and marketing campaigns. Imagine a mashup that captured this - one that included an RSS feed from Google News on key competitor search terms, and benchmarked pricing on key competitive products against your own. This competitive intelligence mashup would be tailored to your industry but you could see how you could benefit from it whether you are a retailer, consumer products company, technology company, pharmaceutical company, or in practically any competitive industry.

5. Community: Mashup your product defect tracking with code management, time-tracking systems and blog commentary.

Odds are you have a number of known issues with your products and you need to quickly assess the severity of the problem in the market. While we're not talking about critical safety defects in an automobile, we are talking about a bug in a piece of software. Mash up your bug database with comments on blogs and user forums to quickly determine whether you should proactively address the issue before the issue balloons into a public relations nightmare.

6. Research Information: Mashup relevant Medical, scientific and Law research with your own internal data.

Whether your business deals with research in the medical, scientific, financial or law fields, connecting the research data that's in the outside world to your own internal work is crucial. Mashing research provides users with quick access and comparison of time sensitive information, providing better access to relevant research and allowing for better internal research decisions and discoveries.

7. Decision Dashboards: Mashup your product specifications, revenue planning, and product information with other products in the market.

Whether your product information exists in Excel spreadsheets or an ERP system, you can easily Mashup that data with external competitive information for better tracking of results, more accurate competitive information, and an increased time to market for your product. You can share these results with other users and have ad-hoc access.