We Blog CRM

Graham Technology, a provider of customer-oriented business software and services, announced this week that the firm will be undergoing some nice personnel growth, with a doubling of workforce at its Indonesian location to come. The company’s Jakarta office will expand from 50 to 100 employees in 2007; the majority of the new hires will be software developers, with a variety of skill sets being sought.

Graham representatives cite the recent launch and subsequent popularity of Ciboodle as making the expansion possible. Graham launched the flagship product, its customer relationship management software bundle for the multi-channel contact centre, in October 2006.

Promising full integratibility with all contact centre channels such as telephony, web, interactive voice response and instant messaging, ciboodle provides a single interface for contact centre agent/customer interaction. Ciboodle is plugged as “a product of 20 years of CRM and business process management expertise at Graham Technology,” and as a solution to “many of the key challenges facing today’s multi-channel contact centre.”

Graham’s Jakarta office has been promised status as “an important development hub for Graham Technology and will be a valuable project resource for the company’s operations across the globe.”

Graham Technology specializes in contact centre software and services. Graham was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Scotland; the company today has nine global offices.

Folks at Wanted Technologies this week announced that the firm had been selected by McClatchy Interactive as a provider of recruitment sales intelligence for its affiliate newspapers. Under terms of the agreement, McClatchy newspapers can implement Wanted’s suite of products in their classified advertising sales process. Wanted promises to provide customized business leads, web-based advertiser analytics, and online market intelligence for the classified recruitment category.

The McClatchy Company is the third largest newspaper company in the United States, with 31 daily newspapers and approximately 50 non-dailies. McClatchy-owned newspapers include The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer, and The (Raleigh) News & Observer.

The company also owns and operates McClatchy Interactive, an interactive operation that provides websites with content, publishing tools and software development; Real Cities, an advertising network of local news sites, including more than 130 newspaper sites; and 15 percent of CareerBuilder, an online job site.

Wanted Technologies sells real-time sales and business intelligence products for the staffing and recruitment, real estate, and media classified advertising industries. Wanted’s sales for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006 were over $1.9 million, up 30 percent from the previous year.

A fat new report put together by AMI-Partners has the consultancy and industry news wires proclaiming that both ERP and CRM are increasingly becoming mainstream applications for medium-sized enterprises in America.

The study is entitled “AMI-Partners’ 2006-2007 U.S. Small and Medium Business Applications & Solutions Market Overview” and the sales pitch for the 124-page behemoth promises to answer questions like “What does the U.S. SMB landscape for business applications solutions look like now, and how is it evolving? What are the hottest opportunities for growth…? [W]hat do you need to do to gain market share in a highly fragmented and underserved SMB market?”

Based on AMI’s 2006-2007 U.S. Small and Medium Business end-user surveys, the report supplies in-depth information, broken down by company size and vertical industry for SMB adoption, plans, spending forecasts, drivers and inhibitors, and channels in accounting, ERP, CRM, SaaS, PC OSs, and network operating systems. The report also examines key related trends, including SMB demographics and attitudes; adoption and future plans for internet-related technologies; and IT and business process outsourcing services.

Vendors highlighted in the report include Intuit, Sage, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, IBM, Google, ADP, and Intacct. Some key statistics presented in the framework of the analysis include:

• Over one-third of survey respondents are currently using ERP/SCM solutions, and another one-quarter are planning to deploy such in the next 12 months.

• Almost 40 percent of medium-sized businesses use CRM solutions today, and almost one-quarter plan to adopt CRM in the next two months.

• Although almost three-quarters of SMBs use business accounting software, just 12 percent of small businesses currently use ERP/SCM software with 11 percent further expecting to do so within the next 12 months.

• 75 percent of those surveyed use an accounting/financials module that is part of an integrated suite.

• U.S. small businesses are “more likely to take a wait-and-see attitude, especially when it comes to ERP/SCM.”

In summation, AMI-Partners analyst Sau Lam says that “This data indicates that U.S. MBs have made the connection between streamlining and automating business processes, and maximizing productivity and value in the market.”

Last week, AMI-Partners released their study on the Voice over Internet Protocol market, entitled “Making the Move to Hosted VoIP or Premise-Based IP-PBX: Different Approaches to SMB VoIP Implementation."

“AMI-Partners’ 2006-2007 U.S. Small and Medium Business Applications & Solutions Market Overview” is available at the Access Markets International website.

New York City-based AMI-Partners specializes in IT, internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence, with emphasis on global small- and medium-sized business enterprises.

Salesforce.com released figures for the company’s fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year 2007, which ended January 31, yesterday and the spin immediately went both ways on the story.

“The fourth quarter was remarkable for its strength across all business segments, products, and geographies,” said Salesforce.com CEO/chairman Marc Benioff, “best demonstrated by our adding 90,000 net new subscribers, and 2,700 net new customers.”

Benioff went on to mention the single largest Salesforce implementation, made in the fourth quarter involving “25,000 subscribers – the largest on-demand CRM customer ever.” (More on just whence the 25,000-subscriber base comes a bit further down.)

Stats regarding fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2007 included:

• Quarter four revenue was $144.2 million, an increase of 58 percent over fourth quarter 2006 and 11 percent over third quarter 2007.

• Subscription and support revenues were $132.1 million, an increase of 60 percent over fourth quarter 2006 and an increase of 12 percent over third quarter 2007.

• For the full year, the company reported revenue of approximately $497.1 million, an increase of 60 percent from the prior year.

• Subscription and support revenues were $451.6 million for the year, an increase of 61 percent, while professional services revenue rose 56 percent to finish at $45.4 million.

Now sure, all those figures look fine, but along comes another pair of rather more unfortunate numbers:

• Quarter four GAAP earnings per share were reported as “break-even.”

• For the full year, GAAP earnings per share were “breakeven.”

Forbes online edition reported that “Shares of customer relationship management software provider salesforce.com Inc. closed down less than 2 percent Thursday, after a day of volatile trading in which investors digested the company’s fourth-quarter report and 2008 guidance.” The Forbes piece noted that “fourth-quarter profit fell sharply on higher costs but compared favorably with Wall Street expectations, as did sales, which surged 58 percent to $144 million. Subscriber growth also was strong…” However, “investors hoped for more from the company’s 2008 forecast.”

Those With The Salesforce also announced that they were “affirming the increased full year revenue outlook [the company] provided on December 12, 2007, with revenue expected to be approximately $710 million to approximately $720 million.”

For the full fiscal year 2008, stock-based compensation expense is expected to be approximately $60 to $70 million.

A recording of the conference call in which the fourth quarter fiscal 2007 results are discussed is available at the Salesforce.com website or by dialing 800.642.1687 or 706.645.9291, passcode 8722215, from now through March 8.

Now about that “mystery Salesforce mega-customer,” as ZDNet’s Colin Barker dubbed it…

Who exactly was it that propped up Salesforce.com’s revenue just enough to allow the numbers not to be emphatically labeled a disaster? The revelation of the customer by Benioff, writes Barker, “prompted analysts to wonder how much impact such a large customer would have on Salesforce’s revenue for next year, because large customers use the company’s customer relationship management software at a heavily discounted rate.”

Barker then does some wondering himself, flipping through Salesforce customers such as Cisco, Dell, Deutsche Bank, Procter & Gamble and Societe Generale.

And CRMchump continues to think on it, too.

SearchCRM.com is running an interesting take on the whole JetBlue fiasco which resulted in 1,102 people having flights cancelled when an ice storm shut down flight routes out of New York City last week – or, as JetBlue CEO David Neeleman put it, ““Obviously […] the most difficult time in our history.”

The article “Is there a CRM lesson in JetBlue’s snafu?” has SearchCRM.com news director Barney Beal demonstrating how, via judicious use of customer service, JetBlue is managing to salvage any bit of customer loyalty out of the problems which were “a significant blow to JetBlue’s reputation for service.”

JetBlue, notes Beal, “has received praise from some CRM analysts for its approach to customer service. It has also earned CRM accolades for its early use of at-home agents, allowing service representatives to take reservations at home. JetBlue operates a call center in Salt Lake City, Utah, with 1,500 agents working from their homes, backed up by 500 people in a central location. However, in the wake of the storm and the subsequent cancellations, the center was overwhelmed.”

The result, of course, was folks waiting on the telephone for assistance for an hour or more, the CRM equivalent of having to spend ten hours in an airplane on the runway or twenty-four hours in an airport.

Well publicized was Neeleman’s announcement posted on the JetBlue website, in which he, King John-like, proclaimed a customer Magna Charta … um, customer bill of rights. In hard cash terms, JetBlue promises to repay inconvenienced customers vouchers for up to the full ticket price.

Over at SearchCRM, CRM consultancy 56 Group LLC president Paul Greenberg compliments Neeleman and co. for doing exactly the right thing. “[JetBlue’s] proactive attempt to create a JetBlue-specific passenger bill of rights is a good sign […] because they are institutionalizing the solution that is likely to best work for their customers in advance of future problems.”

“One bad experience washes away a lot of good ones, and in this case, we are seeing what airline CRM is like,” Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research, kicked in. “In airline CRM you get all the buzzwords and none of the follow-through.” Even more effusive was at least one crisis management expert quoted in The Globe and Mail.

Thanks to the “blizzard of mea culpas,” reads the piece, “crisis management experts said JetBlue is making all the right moves after its initial blunders.” NYU Leonard N. Stern School of Business management communications program director Irv Schenkler emphatically stated that JetBlue had proven themselves “100 miles an hour ahead of the typical corporate response to crises in the United States.”

BigMachines, Inc., a provider of on-demand configuration and quoting software, announced today that Bottomline Technologies has selected the BigMachines CPP solution through the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Bottomline will use BigMachines integrated with Salesforce.com to help their sales team manage configurations and generate quotes. BigMachines CPP will be tightly integrated with Bottomline’s Salesforce.com CRM system to provide a single view of customer data and automatic updating of sales forecasts.

Bottomline supports more than 9,000 customers in industries including financial services, insurance, health care, technology, communications, education, media, manufacturing and government, Bottomline provides products and services to approximately 60 of the Fortune 100 companies and 90 of the FTSE 100 companies. Bottomline was recently bestowed the Best Accounts Payable Services by Global Finance magazine and was named “as a top 100 financial services technology provider” by American Banker.

Founded in 1999, BigMachines, Inc. provides web-based configuration and quoting software and services to help companies streamline sales processes. BigMachines Lean Front-End solution digitizes selling processes and captures an organization’s tribal knowledge to provide online product selection, configurator, quoting, and ordering capabilities for new products and aftermarket parts. BigMachines LFE provides reporting capabilities and integrates to existing ERP, CAD, and CRM systems.

Research firm The Aberdeen Group has released a study entitled “Contract Management: The Quote-to-Cash Cycle,” available on CRMToday.com. The study investigates what the Aberdeeners see as “the growing importance of contract management in customer relationship management.”

In “Contract Management,” 189 participants were involved. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but some key figures showed that:

• 41 percent of respondents reported that management of sales and customer contracts is becoming more important in their organization.

• When queried as to how important contract management is in the entire quote-to-cash cycle, over 50 percent said that it is essential, and 31 percent said it is important.

• The study forecasts that the average percentage of a company’s revenue from contracts is expected to increase from 56 percent to 68 percent over the next two years.

Contract Management: The Quote-to-Cash Cycle can be read in full at CRM2day.com.

A little reading recommendation comes for you today from telephony/customer relationship management VendorGuru.com: A white paper entitled “Taming Telephony: Avoiding Common Mistakes in Choosing a Vendor.”

As a tease to the meat of the material, paper author Bob Embrey states that “Pre-planning is a critical and often neglected phase of deployment, as it links business goals to product features and capabilities … Defining your business objectives and your technical requirements at the outset of the evaluation process is critical.”

The telephony white paper was created to assist businesses in “evaluating web-based applications, VoIP service and providers, interactive voice response, data integration, full call center capabilities and other options.”

Philippines-based Pancake House has announced its recent selection of BatchMaster ERP software. “The former system could no longer handle the existing flow and volume of information; data processing and transmission caused delays and problems rather than expediting the basic necessities of the company,” according to Pancake House finance director Zeny Mercado.

Crucial to the selection was BatchMaster ERP’s Chinese language capability and support. (A lesson to be learned, would-be international CRM product providers…) Like many other ambitious firms, Pancake House is looking at establishing presence in China and will standardize on BatchMaster thanks to the successful pilot implementation in the Philippines.

BatchMaster Software, Inc. has provided ERP product for 21 years and now boasts some 1,500 installations worldwide. BatchMaster clientele are in the food, beverage, cosmetic, personal care, paint, coating, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and specialty chemical industries.

Data, according to web-based data collection/survey software
producer Prezza Technologies, lives. To better capture and gather the tricky
stuff, a philosophy Prezza calls “enterprise feedback management” is used,
“both on the factory floor where your products are assembled, and on the retail
floor where they’re sold.” 

Founded in 2002, Prezza is currently benefiting from a wave
of growth based on increased interest in both web-based surveying and
paper-free data collection systems. The company’s enterprise feedback
management program Checkbox Web Enterprise 4.0 has just been made available,
featuring an upgrade in both name and function.

Prezza’s last major upgrade to Checkbox came in September
2005, when the flagship product was known as the more generic Ultimate
Enterprise Survey 3.0. Ultimate Survey Professional Edition still exists as a
web-based product for small- to medium-sized projects.

The software is a powerful web-based form, feedback, and
survey solution that is easy to use; the main selling point of the Microsoft
.NET-powered Checkbox 4.0 is its no limits pricing model, allowing as many
users, surveys and responses as the largest company can produce. Also touted in
the release are the web survey designer; reporting and analysis features; multilingualism;
web farm and cluster support; and available source code kit.

Since emphasis on EFM is on gathering data and implementing
information quickly, Prezza recently released Checkbox Mobile Edition. Mobile
Edition is designed for those point-of-contact people in the customer service
chain. Well notable in Mobile Edition is its flexibility; surveys and forms can
be deployed on Windows mobile devices, tablet PCs, and laptops using Windows
XP. 

In terms of industry-specific solutions, Checkbox 4.0 can be
shaped to individual enterprise needs in healthcare, with consideration of
government regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley; public-sector, with
emphasis on “citizen-centric” government programs; and financial services, in
which Prezza seeks to address consolidation in the industry and hone “one-stop
shop” capabilities.

As though Prezza would like to display a little of their own
customer service expertise, the company has created a nice come-hither website
with screenshots,
example surveys and demos,
test drives,
downloads,
and basically just a whole bunch of ways to play with Checkbox without spending
a dime. And if it’s not enough, you can even order a live demo – as in live
with a real person.

(This writer must say that playing on the Prezza ‘site is
addictive indeed, and a thousand uses for Checkbox surveying instantly come to
mind…)

For blogheads – and don’t we all love a good blog, really? –
Prezza presents “Survey Software HQ.” The HQ is a good one: well kept up with
and written on disparate enough yet vitally relevant topics, like McDonald’s
versus Starbucks coffee.
 
Pricing for Checkbox 4.0 and related products is available
at the Prezza Technologies website. In the meantime, though, I’d get to playing
with Checkbox a little. You too may soon see the possibilities inherent in
rapidly implementing all that customer data you gather. That is enterprise feedback management.