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Eagency is an application service provider (ASP) that specializes in offering customer relationship management (CRM) systems for small businesses. It hosts personal information management (PIM ) data - calendar, contact, e-mail, tasks and notes - through its Nice Office platform.

The Newport Beach, CA based company says its big differentiator, however, is the capability to fully synchronize said data with various wireless handhelds.

Eagency's claim is that Nice Office increases accessibility to information and applications and opens up a host of new opportunities for generating revenue; decreasing operating and transaction costs, strengthening client relationships, and improving productivity for smaller businesses.

Besides the basic contact management, Nice Office includes an e-mail client, a lead management program, mail merge for e-mail or snail-mail, a journaling system to help you track client activity, reporting and research tools, a sales funnel system that helps you to drill down into a client's needs and fulfill them - as well as maps and directions.

For wireless Eagency’s goal - in short - is to give small businesses the behind the firewall BlackBerry Enterprise server (BES) and Microsoft Exchange experience of large corporations. For BlackBerry wireless handheld users, that usually means turning to BlackBerry Internet Server (BIS) at retail for e-mail and not very BES desktop syncs for other PIM information.

Eagency Nice Office can run on top of BIS for e-mail, true, but offers the wireless sync of PIM data BlackBerry is famous for as well.

Company Chief Operating Officer Tim Allard told PDAStreet anybody that uses hosted e-mail today is Eagency’s target audience. And it's not just BIS users. Nice Office also integrates with contact management solutions like Act, Goldmine, Outlook etc., typically used by small businesses.

"We are targeting the small business user, giving them the power large enterprises have today," Allard explained, aiming to fulfill their information management needs at every level.

All data is hosted and secured by Eagency on their servers, accessible to users through Nice Office's customizable Web interface. Security is essential. Allard put it his way to PDAStreet, "So if everything gets washed away by the next hurricane, you can pick up and carry on."

In addition, if you or an employee loses a device, Eagency can wipe remote info from it and transfer the data to the next handheld or smartphone. In addition to BlackBerry, Nice Office supports the Pocket PC 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC platforms. Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone edition compatibility is due soon. .

Even if you have multiple employees working in remote offices, and you want them to all to have BlackBerry handhelds, they can all go buy their devices separately and then be remotely updated to the Nice Office from a central Web-based console.

Shiny New AutoMobiles
Throughout a demo session, over Cingular's network using a BlackBerry 8700, all messages from (and changes to) Nice Office appeared almost instantaneously. The EA icon in the screen shot above showed Nice Office was installed on the BlackBerry.

We logged into a fake account that our test device was attached to. It was for a pseudo franchise for a car dealership. I wore two hats: a consumer interested in buying a car and the owner of the dealership - a typical small business, as they aren't often corporate run.

As the consumer, I went to the homepage for the car company on a desktop computer, where I perused cars; picking out a model, choosing a color, etc. and - this is key - giving some personal information, including my name, address, e-mail, and phone number.

I said I wanted to buy within the next 72 hours.

As the dealer, I sat in lawn chair at my kid's soccer game. Eagency cited a variation on an old salesman's axiom; that the sooner a sales lead is followed up on the more likely a dealer will close the deal on a car. Better to do so within 24 hours than days.

As soon as I submitted my info as the consumer, my Blackberry - as the owner of the dealership - started to blink, telling me that I had a new lead. An e-mail arrived informing me that a potential customer had just expressed interest in a car.

I clicked on a phone number in the e-mail on my phone, which directly dialed my alter ego, the consumer. It went further.

In the BlackBerry address book - the rolodex - the new consumer's name appeared as well. When I highlighted the name, there was an option to view opportunities. A table on the BlackBerry showed customer fields with preferred method of contact, purchase time and all the information that my consumer-self entered.

So, in the demo, I had called back the lead within a few minutes, possibly before he left the site and it went cold. As the dealer, I also had the option to e-mail documents associated with cars the consumer had been perusing.

Nice Office also regularly logs and keeps track of your everday correspondence within your account.

Eagency's Karen Joffe explained that NiceOffice offers a very customizable system sales funnel setup for whatever your business is or want it to be. Track phone calls, put notes in, e-mail documents and everything you would normally do to follow up with a client, such as the case outlined above.

Customers sign up for Nice Office online and Eagency is currently working on bringing it to retail.

The company said it doesn't take much to walk people through the setup process. Once a change is made on the desktop, through the Web interface, it is then reflected automatically on a handheld or handhelds. It is supposedly that easy.

While there's a version of Nice Office that is free, called Personal, it costs $19.95 per month to add wireless functionality. Nice Office Small Business sells for $29.95 a month, and Nice Office Corporate - which adds wireless connectivity to databases –goes for 49.95.

Eagency even has wireless version of the solution for non-business orientated individuals; such as a really busy soccer mom, the example their representatives gave us. Called Rover, it is slated for official introduction at CTIA this week, and is already outlined on their Web site.

For $9.95 per month, Rover retrieves your e-mail, contacts, calendar items, and tasks; synchronizing all that information over the air to your device and the Rover Web portal, without a cable or cradle.