We Blog CRM

RightNow Technologies has a added multi-channel feedback features in its May ‘08 release of its on-demand CRM package. Essentially, a consumer feedback feature, the new feature incorporates online chat. This throws open several possibilities for web marketers. They can obtain consumer feedback in real time, customers can get issues resolved faster, surveys are attached with the chat platform, and the contact between and company and its customers becomes more personal.

RightNow CRM enables surveys during phone calls, via e-mail as well as on the Web. The chat feature will help RightNow CRM strengthen its position as an application friendly towards business-to-customer communication.

A very nice and succinct piece here that touches upon the manner in which businesses into commodity trading and those selling high-value goods can make use of CRM. CRM is now being used by businesses to add to the soft value that a consumer perceives in a transaction apart from the object/service he purchases and the amount he pays for it.

The value-adds act as important differentiators and allow businesses to create space for themselves in competitive scenarios. Product and price differentiation is no longer sufficient to draw in the customers. CRM helps by making sense out of data that is gathered from the customers and the information is used to tailor service around a customer’s likes and dislikes.  The service sector finds it the hardest to do business on quantitative value alone and hence is pressed to come out with innovative value propositions for customers.

American of Martinsville, a Virginia-based contract furniture manufacturer, will be deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. American of Martinsville has a major presence in the furniture segment consisting of hospitality and health care markets.

American of Martinsville will use Microsoft Dynamics AX to automate its quoting process, project management and customer communications. Microsoft Dynamics CRM modules implemented by the company include project management, quote management and customer communications.

The company chose Microsoft CRM after evaluating products from Sage, SYSPRO, SAP AG, and Infor.

ISM Inc, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Contact Center strategic advisors, operating out of Bethesda, Maryland, has included Sage in its Top 15 CRM Small & Medium Business Software Award winners for 2008.  Sage products are a regular feature at these awards; Sage CRM received the ISM award for the sixth consecutive year, while Sage SalesLogix received the award for a tenth straight year.

Sage products were deemed worthy of the award after undergoing 217 selection tests that included 103 business functions, 52 technical features, 36 implementation capabilities, 9 real time CRM criteria and 17 user support features.

Sage, on its part, reiterated its focus on delivering reliable and flexible solutions that are interoperable and connect back-office to the front office.

Given that the enterprise market is pretty saturated and renewing licenses is pretty much only way to make money off the big companies; it is not surprising that software vendors are looking to target the mid-market segment.The growth of SaaS has been a major factor in driving the attention of companies like SAP and Oracle towards SMBs.

SAP started offering MySAP CRM as a hosted service around two years ago. The company fell behind Salesforce.com and many other pure SaaS players, partly because of the delay in bringing out Business ByDesign. Yet, SAP has kept up its efforts in the SaaS CRM arena and in the recently concluded SAPPHIRE user conference, it announced new CRM functionality in its Business All-in-One solution for medium-sized companies.

The economy may be going slow but Salesforce.com, the poster boy for SaaS, has reported an impressive 52% increase in revenue for the first quarter that ended on April 30. It has also increased its customer base by 6%.

Salesforce.com has reported impressive figures that have been achieved on the basis of a strong and growing customer base in the US and in Asia. It added 2.600 more companies to its roster in the quarter and reported revenue of $ 247.6 million leading to a net profit of $ 9.56 million.

In Asia, Salesforce.com can count on Nippon Telephone and Telegraph in Japan as a major catch and in Europe it was Areva, a nuclear power company in France, for which Salesforce.com had to face competition from SAP.

SAP’s ambitious Business ByDesign venture has run into another roadblock. The ERP and CRM suite touted by SAP to be the mother of all SaaS offerings has been pushed back by SAP by another six months so that the company can pay more attention to issues such as reining in the TCO and developing a proper user interface. The delay was too good a chance for SaaS leader Salesforce.com to let go and Steve Russel was quoted as saying that the rate at which Business ByDesign was progressing, it would always remain the “future” of SAP. SAP reiterated its commitment towards SaaS and denied cutting back on investments in the on-demand field.

Although SAP has missed the SaaS bus, the company does not feel that it has lost prospective customers to competitors - traditional or SaaS.

Salesforce.com veteran Andy Ross has joined Model Metrics as Director of Corporate Sales. Ross was a senior manager at Salesforce.com and one of the earliest employees of the company. Ross will be responsible for developing the mid market for Model Metrics. Ross has come quite a long way since the early days of establishing SaaS and PaaS at Salesforce.com and even before those days when he was an English teacher at a school in Milwaukee.

Model Metrics works in close partnership with Salesforce.com and it has grown from sales force automation implementations to large-scale products using Salesforce.com technology, business process and change management expertise across both customer relationship management (CRM) and non-CRM related initiatives.

iEnterprises has launched Mobile Edge Express, a SaaS product aimed at mobile users who wish to maximize the productivity of their IBM Lotus Notes applications, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, and SugarCRM to their BlackBerry® smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM). The company pitches the product as being ideal for SMBs that can download the pre-written application without any upfront hardware costs and licensing fees. The download takes less than 10 minutes.

Hospitallbroeders, the Dutch healthcare foundation, has selected the customer relationship management software from Saturn Corporation

With Eprisa in place, the hospital does not have to worry about unauthorized access to data as the software allows access to information based on user profiles.

John Mitchell, the foundation’s executive director, said: “After considering several alternatives, we selected Saturn’s Eprísa application to manage our various programs, which include direct mail, telemarketing and door-to-door fundraising.

“We find Eprísa’s flexible design helps us to cultivate better relationships for our supporters. The real-time reports, graphs and charts enable us to make accurate and timely decisions, and turnaround on batch processes has been reduced from hours to seconds.”