We Blog CRM

CRM software provider Soffront Software Inc. today announced that Ensafe Inc. has implemented Soffront CRM to develop a customer knowledge base and self help program. Ensafe provides environmental consulting services to clients worldwide.

Soffront Help Desk is help desk software designed for mid-size businesses, seeking to assist companies in managing customer support tickets from submission to resolution. Ensafe is using the software for numerous processes including ticket tracking, workflow, notifications to users and IT, and knowledge base applications.

“The software has also helped us increase efficiency and decrease duplication of efforts,” said one Ensafe exec. “Overall, fewer man hours are spent on trouble ticket issues. I would estimate that our overall savings so far this year is approximately US $65,000.”

Self-billed as a pioneer of CRM since 1992, Soffront offers end-to-end, fully integrated CRM solutions spanning sales, marketing, customer service and employee help desks; the firm’s clientele now exceeds 500. Soffront is a privately-held firm.

American Express Incentive Services has joined with Centive, a provider of on-demand strategic sales compensation management, to offer prepaid AEIS cards as a special incentive reward – or spiff, press material, tells The Chump – option in Centive’s on-demand sales compensation solution Compel.

AEIS prepaid cards will provide Compel customers with a spiff option separate from the standard cash reward. Cards may be customized and personalized, and can theoreticallz direct recipients’ spending options to ensure that the reward is memorable.

AEIS is a joint venture between American Express Travel Related Services Company Inc. and Maritz Inc., provides business-to-business reward solutions including prepaid cards, American Express Gift Cheques and a web-based reward management tool. AEIS is headquartered in Fenton, Mo.

Headquartered in Burlington, Mass., Centive bills itself as “the recognized leader in on-demand strategic sales compensation management.” Compel was recently bestowed a 2006 CODiE award for "Best Financial Software," the 2006 CRM Excellence award from Customer Interaction Solutions, and is a 2006 eWeek Excellence Award finalist.

Two million pounds sterling? A brilliant deal for early in the week, old chap! That’s the way it panned out for WDMP Communications Ltd. on this Tuesday, with London-based package tour operator Thomson Holidays handing over its £2 million (approximately US $3.74 million) UK customer relationship management and customer-acquisition business to WDMP.

Thomson is contracting for a direct and online strategy, primarily targeting its existing customer database; activity will include a series of monthly mailings, which will be personalized based on customer history. This drive, which is scheduled to begin later this year, will be supported by an online and email campaign created in-house.

According to Nielsen Media Research, Thomson Holidays invests more than £19 million (approximately US $35.56 million) on promotional activity in the UK, making it one of the biggest spenders on direct activity in the sector.

The tender was a result of parent company TUI’s review of the £15 million (approximately US $28 million) UK advertising account for its Thomsonfly and Thomson brands.

Customer experience management software and solutions provider ResponseTek Networks Corp. and Lloyds TSB, having announced a joint Customer Service Week project, are probably quite busy as you read this.

Through Friday, ResponseTek will be collecting and analyzing customer experience information provided by Lloyds TSB customers. Using information collected by the ResponseTek:CEM solution, ResponseTek’s customer experience experts will then theoretically help Lloyds TSB staff understand more about how individual interactions with customers are affecting customer advocacy, a strong indicator of growth and profitability.

The gauntlet thrown in this deal? “Over a short period of time,” says ResponseTek CEO Syed Hasan, “the company will have a glimpse into where they are successfully delivering their customer promise.”

Lloyds TSB is one of Europe’s leading financial services companies, with over 69,000 staff and 16 million customers. The Group’s extensive distribution network includes approximately 2,000 branches, plus internet and telephone banking.

Headquartered in Vancouver, BC, ResponseTek Networks Corp. outfits Global 2000 firms with its customer experience management solutions. Among ResponseTek clientele are Aon, HSBC, NTL, T-Mobile, WestJet, and Xerox.

Customer-centric master data management solution provider Siperian today announced a completed set of architectural styles that will assist organizations in deploying a tailor-made Siperian MDM solution. The architectural styles are called Master Identity, Customer-centric Master Data Management, and Customer-centric Operational Views.

Siperian’s architectural flexibility seeks to enable companies to “start small within a business unit leveraging the Master Identity solution in order to deliver rapid return on investment, and then extend the solution over time across the enterprise to become the authoritative master data management platform.”

The Master Identity solution assists in accurately identifying key entities such as customers, people and households across different systems and deliver real-time views of the dispersed data to downstream systems.

Customer-centric Master Data Management seeks to create and manage the “best version of truth” (that’s what it says here) of customer-related master reference and relationship data across disparate internal systems and third-party sources such as Acxiom and Dun & Bradstreet.

Customer-centric Operational Views federates customer transaction data in real time from multiple channels and unifies it with master reference and relationship data.

All products are based in the Siperian Hub, the Siperian adaptive platform for customer-centric data integration and management.

Research conducted by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business with the support of automotive marketing services company Autobytel Inc. has produced encouraging new results for users of customer management systems.

According a survey which followed up earlier analysis, auto dealerships using customer management systems are performing some 23 percent better than their competition. The study was undertaken by researchers of the school’s Department of Decision and Information Technologies; surveys were distributed through Autobytel Inc. to thousands of customer dealerships.

Earlier results released from the survey in February 2006 showed that dealerships using customer management systems were performing 15 percent better than competitors without. With completion of the analysis, that figure has been bumped eight percentage points higher. Customer dealerships, including those that use the Autobytel Web Control system and Retention Performance Marketing programs, were analyzed.

Touted as “the first of its kind from a major academic research institution,” the final numbers revealed the eye-opening statistic of 91 percent of survey respondents reporting that customer management systems had created value in the vehicle sales process.

Another interesting finding was that simply having the technology at the dealership made no significant difference in performance. Instead, there was shown to be a direct correlation between success and using the technology on a daily basis, implementing business process change tactics, and amount of available automation capabilities used.

The study defines customer management systems as information systems used to attract and manage sales leads and customers through pre-sales and post-sales activities. Additional research results measured how automated service retention programs affect dealership performance and how information technology influences employee effectiveness in sales and service departments.

Jason Kuruzovich, lead researcher and doctoral candidate in information systems at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, concluded that “These results suggest that a dealership’s adoption and use of customer-focused technologies during the sales process can be a critical source of competitive advantage.”

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an institution specializing in management education and research for the digital economy. The Smith School boasts education locations in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Autobytel Inc. is an internet-based automotive marketing services company, assisting retailers in selling cars and manufacturers in building brands through marketing, advertising, CRM products and programs. Autobytel owns and operates Autobytel.com, Autoweb.com, Carsmart.com, Car.com, AutoSite.com, Autoahorros.com, and CarTV.com.

Coremetrics representatives today announced that apparel cataloger Blair Corporation has chosen Coremetrics’ web analytics platform to handle streamlined reporting for multiple sources of data. Blair will use the Coremetrics tools in the customer service sphere, and the visualization tools for its e-commerce website www.blair.com.

Coremetrics’ integration with the IBM Websphere Commerce Suite, e-mail service provider Silverpop and SAS Marketing Automation played “a major role” in Blair’s decision. Coremetrics is a provider of on-demand web analytics and precision marketing solutions.

Based in San Mateo, Calif., Coremetrics now services over 600 brands and takes pride in its status as the integrated web analytics solution for IBM WebSphere Commerce. The company is privately held with funding from Accel Partners, FTVentures, and Highland Capital Partners.

Billing it as a “utility-priced CRM,” California company Kyliptix Solutions, Inc. today unveiled KiBS CRM. KiBS is designed for small- and medium-sized businesses and promises “zero upfront costs.” KiBS CRM is a productivity tool that includes customer-service applications for small businesses such as sales force automation, marketing, and customer support.

KiBS CRM customer engagement applications include web lead capture, Outlook integration, reporting, generation of quotes, sales orders, invoicing, and support of multiple languages. With headquarters in Irvine, Calif., privately held Kyliptix Solutions Inc. designs, develops, and markets web-based on-demand application management software for the small- and medium-sized business market.

Kyliptix prides itself its reported status as “the first company of its kind to adopt a utility-style, use-based billing model that eliminates the upfront investment associated with software acquisition.”

Marketing firm Haygarth has created a customer loyalty program for the British automobile brand Kia which seeks to communicate with customers at key stages in the consumer process. As Haygarth associate director Tom Charles rationalized, “integrating the CRM and customer acquisition activity is an important step in ensuring that Kia has seamless consumer communication.”

Along with the announcement was a display of the new Kia welcome pack with a guide to alternative motorway food stops, a mailing with a first-birthday card for the car (!), as well as upgrade mailings. Prior to the launch of the CRM programme, Haygarth produced a qualification mailing designed to clean the database and request information on customers’ replacement intentions; company figures showed that the mailing achieved a 27 percent response rate, which company reps called a success.

Haygarth was contracted to handle Kia’s £1 million direct marketing account in March 2006, and is reportedly the car company’s first below-the-line agency, with most of its previous promotional activity created by above-the-line agency, Mustoes. Kia Motors Corporation was founded in Korea in 1944 and first came to the United Kingdom in 1991; since this time, the firm has concentrated efforts in European expansion.

Evolutionary Technologies International Inc., a provider of data integration solutions, has announced the general release of a couple new products determined to prettify databases worldwide: ETI Data Profiler and ETI Data Cleanser.

These products are touted as making extendable the functional capabilities of ETI Solution V5 software and ETI High Performance Connectors to provide data quality in a full-feature platform offering. The ETI Data Profiler product offers a solution that proports to discovers the content, structure and quality of data sources from the start of an IT project; through counts, advanced statistics, pattern recognition, inconsistency identification, anomalies, unique key values and data relationships does the program buzz away, using automated discovery and analysis.

Company figures show that ETI Data Profiler can reduce the total cost of analysis by almost one-third. Theoretically, ETI Data Profiler than takes on associated data quality improvement, trackable through the integrated issue management feature; said feature promises greater visibility. ETI Data Cleanser deals with data quality problems, and specializes in what the firm’s brain trust sees as the most troublesome of all problems in data loss: the random nature of many data errors.

ETI Data Cleanser reportedly features advanced fuzzy matching technology including Soundex, a phonetic-based algorithm. Along with fuzzy logic, ETI Data Cleanser includes algorithms to clean replacement, transposition and semantic errors; the cleanser can also parse, standardize, correct, enhance, match and deduplicate data from virtually any source.

ETI Data Cleanser can run in line with production systems or offline for batch-based projects using traditional servers or grid computing infrastructure. Founded in 1991, Evolutionary Technologies International Inc. is a provider of enterprise data integration solutions for government IT organizations and Global 1000 companies.

Applications implemented by ETI include SOA, ETL, EAI, EII, CRM, ERP, compliance reporting and data warehousing. Among the Evolutionary clientele base are Caterpillar, the Department of Defense, Hallmark Publishers, and Royal Bank of Canada. ETI provides software and services that automate the seamless exchange of data between incompatible systems.