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Enterprise business software and services provider SSA Global today announced the general release of SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0, enhancements to SSA CRM, the company’s suite of customer relationship management solutions powered by E.piphany. The solution seeks to provide a comprehensive 360 degree view of each customer by providing a customer and product list that streamlines the sales quotation, order creation and service processes.

SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0 provide integration to SSA ERP, SSA Global’s flagship enterprise resource planning solutions. The programs leverage SSA Open Architecture, the SSA Global services-oriented architecture, in the hopes of enabling integration with extant and future systems.

Chicago-headquartered SSA Global is a provider of enterprise business software for mid-sized and large organizations, primarily in select manufacturing, consumer and services industries. SSA software solutions include enterprise resource planning, financial management, human capital management, corporate performance management, customer relationship management, product lifecycle management, supply chain management and supplier relationship management. SSA Global has more than 50 locations worldwide and is used by customers in over 90 countries.

AARM, an international organization that focuses on best practices in CRM, today announced the formation of a Customer Equity Initiative. AARM president Robert T. Stacey stated a lofty goal for the creation: “This initiative is designed to help companies in any field … learn how to optimize their business practices to deliver what today’s customers’ value and accrue customer equity.”

More specifically, the initiative promotes business practices that lead to sustainable win-win-win business relationships where customers, employees and companies get what they value: the quasi-mythical land in the end-game where all three parties win. Initiative program director Dr. John I. Todor got further to the heart of the matter in saying that “In today’s business climate, gaining and sustaining profitability is a battle for customer mindshare. Winning mindshare is about customers, their desires and emotions.”

The Customer Equity Initiative, then, is designed to help companies address these challenges. As customers shift their focus from the product to the experience associated with it, the imperative states that companies must realign their strategies to deliver engaging customer experiences or face assimilation. For most companies, resistance is not quite futile but does require a major transformation that includes changing their use of customers, employees, policies and practices to align them with the new mission.

The mission statement for the Customer Equity Initiative is “to provide the knowledge tolls and forum for companies to make a successful transition and reap the long-term benefits of customer equity.” Founded in 1995, AARM is an organization and network of business associates and executives specializing in CRM and related subject areas.

Fremont, Calif.-based CRM software provider Soffront Software has released Soffront CRM version 8.6, promising “considerable” enhancements to marketing, sales capabilities, customer support functionality, automation and integration. In marketing and sales capabilities, Soffront 8.6 seeks to improve efficacy in sales. A new module allows the design, execution and tracking of surveys.

Enhanced calendar filtering seeks to allow salespeople to better manage priorities and activities. The new marketing calendar reportedly increases visibility of marketing initiatives. Additional enhancement has been applied to reporting, performance, direct mail, telephone marketing, and document management functions. In customer support, Soffront CRM 8.6 includes a module to manage service-level agreements and a professional services module to assist service providers in planning, executing and managing customer projects.

Other support enhancements include automatic email processing and response, inter-departmental collaboration, customer fora, and self-service. Enhanced automation in Soffront CRM v8.6 includes a visual workflow designer and a process automation to ease in executing business processes. The new version of Soffront CRM also includes a remote asset discovery module to better manage IT assets for remote employees. And chief among the upgrades is the reported improvement to integration with Microsoft Outlook.

The greater flexibility and functionality promised should allow customers to file Outlook email easily within the extant CRM system. More improvement to 8.6 integration comes in back office applications and configuration management software such as Perforce. 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.

San Francisco, Calif.-based on-demand retention marketing firm Loyalty Lab, Inc. has released their line of “Loyalty Line Solutions.” And, as an attention grabber, press material gives guarantees for ROI outcomes for the most common problems faced by consumer brand marketers.

The five members of the Loyalty Line Solutions set are the following. The Cross-Sell Driver allows probing and education in a broad range of promotional activities, to find the specials that foster cross sell performance. Loyalty Line promises increases in purchases across categories by an estimated twenty percent. The loftily titled “Customer Evangelist” would “produce a real source of new customers by recognizing and rewarding both referrer and referee.” The promise here is an approximate doubling of customer acquisition through word of mouth. The Magic Moments program involves those “watershed events in a customer relationship.” The feature is designed to analyze key behavioral customer transition. Loyal Line says the program will reduce the number of inactive customers by at least ten percent. Second Sale consists of a customer management program focused on generating a repeat purchase. Promised is an estimated twenty percent increase in transaction frequency. Smart Email is a personalized email that focuses on engaging customers to interact at what Loyal Line PR claims can reach five times typical open rates. This is said to approximately double email open rates and increase conversion by thirty percent.

The full Loyalty Lab’s platform, spearheaded by its flagship customer relationship manager suite is also still available, essentially featuring these features and more. Loyalty Lab creators formulated their individual programs based on experience and study of dozens of loyalty and retention marketing programs. After a comprehensive study of users, the recently created solutions seek to clear up problems experienced by the overwhelming majority: insufficient repeat customers, retaining at-risk customers and such. “We’ve discovered that many marketers, regardless of their company’s core competencies, are trying to solve the same problems,” summarized Loyalty Lab CEO Mark H. Goldstein.

Loyalty Lab currently holds the leading spot in on-demand relationship and retention marketing solutions for consumer brands. Among their clients are 1-800-Flowers.com, Bally Total Fitness, Pfaltzgraff, and Smith & Hawken.

As though the Customer Respect Group’s survey of last week weren’t enough, here comes another consumer report that makes certain aspects of the CRM industry look very bad indeed. In the middle of May, the international research and consulting firm CRG released their “Second Quarter 2006 Online Customer Respect Study.” The report card given certain CRM companies and the industry in general was none too pleasing. And in CRG’s “communications” section, most of the big twelve CRMers certified were dubbed “poor” in the category.

Now here comes another one.

Entitled “Customers Say What Companies Don’t Want to Hear” (let the pessimism begin), the research study polled thousands of consumers regarding some fundamental business management concepts. The results indicate gaps of understanding, perceptions of unsympathetic CRM providers, and growing customer dissatisfaction. Richard A. Lee and Dr. David J. Mangen co-authored the study. Mangen is of Mangen Research Associates while Lee calls High-Yield Methods the office; the two have worked together many times previously.

The foreword is by Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light: Customer Strategies for the 21st Century. Greenberg has quite the high opinion of Lee and Mangen. Most importantly, CRM guru Greenberg comments that “there are lessons in this study for customers, marketers, advertising agencies and CRM practitioners” and that the study “proves a mission-critical strategic point. Businesses need to rethink their logic and develop new operating models based on customer centric behaviors and valuations.” One would think such philosophy is obvious, but given that the findings have already been called “shocking” while rippling through the trade press, clearly Lee and Mangen are on to something. Some of study tidbits being bandied about in popular press include the acknowledgement of the presence of a growing gap between customer expectations and company behavior.

The study authors go on to note that this condition actually creates opportunity for some companies, should they be paying attention to market forces. And on the subject of market forces, the study states that “buyers are taking widespread control of buyer-seller relationships, and many companies don’t know how to respond.” As indicating in the CRG study, the amount of direct attention given the customer is overwhelmingly the single most important factor in consumer decisions. Meanwhile, the option of online customer service was nearly irrelevant in purchasing decisions. CRM was singled out in the survey for its focus on technology-laden solutions and support rather than taking that customer-based focus so ardently wanted by consumers.

Again, the Mangen and Lee study is akin to that of CRG’s, producing the conclusion that CRM firms are erring in exactly the area in which they ostensibly specialize. Indeed, Mangen has an airtight answer for the would-be debaters of the conclusions printed in “Customers Say”: “Frankly, contesting the core findings means telling customers they don’t know what they’re talking about–and that’s pretty far down the slippery slope of doing what you want to do, not what customers want you to do.” After all, the study’s statistical measures and fact finding has been praised as “comprehensive and straightforward.” Neither critical acclaim nor a bit of backlash from the business world are new experiences for the study leaders.

Mangen is a highly credentialed customer expert and author of eight books. Lee is an internationally-respected consultant and author in the customer-centricity field. Predictions of Siebel Systems’ fall helped get Mangen Research and High-Yield Methods on the map in a big way, or, more previously, the demise of Siebel two years later did. Another Mangen and High-Yield joint effort indicated the present-day slowing of the CRM industry, dude, to the gradual diminishment of spending on CRM. Greenberg, meanwhile, has jumped on board in time for Mangen and Lee to warn about the newest industry-wide Titanic. Contributing a foreword available for free reading online at www.the56group.typepad.com, Greenberg both sells the book and eloquently urges careful studying of the book. First, the hype. Paragraph one: “[Mangen and Lee] have this tendency to initiate groundbreaking studies every other year. They ALWAYS find something that companies don’t want to hear but have to hear. And they ALWAYS seem to be right.”

As Greenberg sees it, Mangen and Lee’s findings are not surprising, but actually seeing the hard data to back up the philosophy and prognostication is. Greenberg (and, by inference, the study’s authors) imagines that our world is now a consumer ecosystem, as opposed to the corporate business ecosystem that dominated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He figures Mangen and Lee to be among the first to realize this and that CRM professionals had better become “disabused” quickly “of serious misperceptions.” (Just to satisfy the curious, top kudos were given to Amazon.com for its high customer-centricity, and Wal-mart was deemed the least such. Lee has implied that he sees a dark future for Wal-mart.)

Cognos Inc., known as the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced the launch of the Cognos Store Development Blueprint, a retail performance solution designed to assist retailers in effectively planning, managing and measuring the financial impact of store development initiatives, including new store construction, remodeling, refurbishments and upgrades.

The Store Development Blueprint includes features such as top-down planning to integrate finance, store development and store operations; analysis for development scenarios; consolidation features; forecasting and re-forecasting options; embedded workflow functionality; and, naturally, complete integration with the Cognos Store Operations Planning Blueprint. The software is designed to reduce time and risk associated with new performance management implementation, and promises to enabling businesses synchronization and coordination of financial and operational plans. The Cognos Store Development Blueprint comes on the heels on Cognos’ other industry-specific performance solution, Cognos Store Operation Planning Blueprint, which was released in January, and represents yet another feather in the cap of this heavily producing company.

In early May, Cognos introduced a pair of new products designed to assist pharmaceutical companies in improving clinical trials management and sample distribution for sales reps. The Cognos Clinical Trial Forecasting Blueprint is promised to help “pharmaceutical companies better anticipate clinical trial resource requirements and accompanying expenses in order to comply with FDA filing requirements.” And early in the year, Cognos announced a deal with business data quality product company Similarity Systems, in which Cognos and Similarity would work together to provide “enterprise customers with a range of products for analyzing, managing, monitoring and improving the quality of data within the Cognos platforms.”

Getting down to brass tacks, this means that Similarity Systems data quality metrics will be employed within Cognos 8 Business Intelligence; the latest upgrade to this product was released in March, thereby encouraging the addition of Del Monte Produce and Mueller, Inc. to Cognos’ impressive catalogue of customers. The firm now boasts a clientele which reportedly includes over sixty of the top 250 retailers in the world (including 7-Eleven, amazon.com and American Eagle Outfitters) and over 300 retail chains worldwide. Cognos customers can get the Cognos Store Development Blueprint as of the release date (today, 17 May 2006) is available immediately to Cognos customers, and the program will be on display for demos at the 2006 Retail Systems Conference and Exposition in Chicago next week.

On the human resources front, Cognos representatives announced on Monday that Les Rechan had been hired to fill the position of chief operating officer; Rechan will be responsible for international sales, services and marketing operations. He brings twenty years’ worth of experience from a virtual “Who’s Who” of CRM: IBM, Oracle and Siebel Systems.

According to this news item, CRM solutions provider Lagan Technologies Ltd. representatives recently announced that they have been selection to provide a CRM solution to the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. The Frontline CRM solution is to act as front-end interface for existing information systems in Richmond, with the aim of creating a single point of contact for the 174,000 citizens there. Theoretically allowing the answering four-fifths of incoming calls regarding waste, recycling, parks, and trees and planning services at first point of contact, the system is to integrate with Richmond’s existing back-office systems; automation of contact centre business processes used is expected to result.

The current Richmond contact centre receives approximately 600 calls per day. Such upgrades are happening around the UK right now as a result of government regulations, and this town proved no exception. Press material states that the Richmond council, like innumerable others, “recognised that the fundamental objective underlying the recently introduced government legislation and initiatives was to create a better and more efficient service for its citizens and deploying CRM as the key building block would enable a more modernized and streamlined service delivery.”

Lorna Gill, Principal Consultant in the Business Consultancy Unit at Richmond-upon-Thames Borough Council, was quoted on www.publictechnology.net as saying, “It is evident that for the foreseeable future, the preferred method of contact will be via telephone, so we were keen to address this and ensure that our citizens’ experience was improved and standardized across the Council.” With the completion of the first phase of implementation, email integration with Frontline will proceed, in order to provide citizens with 24 / 7 access to information from the contact center.

Confirmit 10.5 has been released on FIRM ASP environments. The Oslo, Norway-based EFM / market research CRM-related software vendor today announced the release of the new version of the program. Confirmit Kiosk will be included in the platform; this program promises the opportunity for offline customer experience measurement.

Also included is Confirmit Rapid Results. Confirmit Rapid Results had actually hit the market about one month ago and with its release came the announcement of its compatibility with Confirmit 10.5. Confirmit Rapid Results is a new complimentary online analysis and collaborative insight application for Confirmit users. Together with the release of Confirmit 10.5, Confirmit Rapid Results promises to enable business executives and other stakeholders to quickly and intuitively access top-line results, conduct analysis, and act on business critical insight. “Critical insight” is a particularly often used expression in the FIRM vocabulary.

As FIRM vice president of marketing Kjell Øksendal says in press material, “Great insight drives great business decisions across initiatives and departments, such as product development, customer service, human resources and marketing.” Øksendal goes on to theorize that “The challenge many companies face is the diluted value of insight.” Øksendal believes that “True Enterprise Feedback Management is about collecting and analyzing attitudinal data in a uniformed manner across the enterprise and driving that data into business processes, turning it into actionable insight,” touting his product as ideal for “experiences and attitudes across the enterprise and in any context to be measured and acted on in a way that powers competitive edge far beyond any other EFM technology.”

Confirmit Kiosk allows offline on-site survey deployment and enterprise feedback gathering for HR, CRM and marketing activities or, as FIRM representatives put it, to “implement enterprise feedback programs on a global scale both on the web and offline in their various locations.” Confirmit is used in customer satisfaction surveys employee satisfaction surveys and market research surveys.

Confirmit Rapid Results in tandem with Confirmit Reportal, seeks to provide the ultimate analysis and insight delivery platform available for market research and enterprise insight management. Confirmit Rapid Results enables users such as marketers and researchers to conduct real-time analysis online in a quick and intuitive interface for tabulation and charting, providing business users with a means to identify target segments and quickly visualize data in a variety of views. Confirmit Reportal enables users to share their findings and insight with an unlimited number of people through secure report portals.

Confirmit users can provide stakeholders with interactive access to reports created in Confirmit Rapid Results. The products are merely the latest in the quite moving FIRM’s line. Earlier this month, then-released first quarter results showed FIRM revenue increase twenty-four percent, up to $4.8 million from last year’s $3.9 million. Adjusted overall growth was posted at twenty-nine percent. Both geographic segments contributed to the strong revenue growth; EMEA 26%, North America 22%. Revenues from licenses and transactions in first quarter 2006 increased by 39% while revenues from consultancy and other were reduced by 44% compared to first quarter 2005. Operating results (EBIT) for the first quarter in 2006 were $334,000 compared to $154,000 in the corresponding quarter of 2005, for a margin of seven percent.

Profit was listed at $308,000, up from last year’s $136,000. FIRM total assets were posted at $20.8 million, with fixed assets representing $7.7 million and total current assets $13.2 million. FIRM’s total equity ratio at first quarter’s end was $16.5 million. FIRM CEO Henning Hansen opined that “The first quarter illustrates that FIRM is well equipped to deliver a strong performance for 2006. We are pleased with the performance in both Europe and USA, and are excited that even more leading companies have started using and standardizing on our strong software platform.”

FIRM analysis cited new contracts as a primary reason for the increases. In the first quarter of 2006, Taylor Nelson Sofres, British Council and MARC Research all renewed their contracts with FIRM. FIRM also signed new contracts with several Market Research companies and enterprises such as Data Development Worldwide and Intrawest. Also contributing to the success was FIRM’s partnership with the NPD Group to develop a new panel management and sample selection platform. This partnership seeks to combine the market leading survey, panel and reporting technology resources from FIRM with NPD’s market leading domain expertise in panel management. The vision of the joint initiative is to create and introduce the next generation platform to the market research industry as well as to large enterprise customers.

According to prnewswire the launch of the S1 Marketing Center was announced today by customer interaction software solutions vendor S1 Corporation. Promising to improve cross selling, S1 Marketing Center represents an additional component to the firm’s Full Service Banking Application. S1 Marketing Center is integrated with the Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. MISER core processing system. S1 Marketing Center is also integrated with MISER and Seibel data warehouses. S1 Marketing Center for MISER profiles data on customers, segments for specific seasons and promotions, with the goal of identifying cross-selling opportunities for customer service representatives. The software defines appropriate cross-selling responses for bank tellers, account service representatives, contact center representative and internet channels.

S1 Marketing Center delivers cross-selling prompts when transactions occur with a qualified customer. In after-sale features, S1 Marketing Center can track customer response, goal achievement, sales results and referrals. In press material, S1 Corporation group president Alan Hale was quoted as saying that, with the new component, “Now MISER users can be much more proactive and effective in cross selling to existing customers.” During experimentation and beta release, S1 Marketing Center received some rave reviews. At New Castle, Ind.-based Ameriana Bank and Trust, S1 Marketing Center marketing initiatives assisted in all manner of branch bank dealings including CDs, deposit account for commercial lending customers, home equity credit lines, IRAs, and even rewards for customers in their silver anniversary with the bank. Ameriana Bank and Trust vice president / sales manager Vicki Popplewell went so far as to call the product “exciting,” touting it for being “very easy to use … When management wants to know who the prospects are for a promotion they are considering, I can find out almost immediately.”

The threesome of Popplewell, information technology vice president Stacy Darling and CEO / executive vice president Timothy G. Clark, all agreed that the tool had been a “key factor” in their recent success. Oswego, N.Y.-based Oswego County National Bank installed the product in six days and found a number of unique uses for the application, including the very handy new user of S1 Market Center, installed the tool in less than a week and has already used it for most interesting and unique applications. “We see Marketing Center as more than a marketing tool,” senior vice president and chief information officer Judy Percy, senior vice president and chief information officer. “…we are already using the product to cleanse and gather account information. If we need, say, the customer’s birth date or an updated address, the tool prompts the teller to ask for this information.”

There are several things that companies focusing on building customer relationships should pay particular attention to. These include paying attention to basic issues like spelling the customer’s name correctly and updating databases promptly in case of a name/address change. This is so that the database holds the correct name and the right address.

The segmentation/classification of service levels should be broken to an inquiring customer in the most discreet way possible. The behavior and non-verbal gestures of the customer-facing staff should inspire a feeling of confidence in customers and not come across as faux friendliness. Subscriptions to offers and upgrades should be at the customer’s discretion and companies should avoid foisting new services and the concomitant charges on unsuspecting consumers.