We Blog CRM

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.

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.”

Ribbit Corporation, a VoIP company, has added a service that allows users to push voicemail from their cell phones to a Salesforce database. This updates customer records and facilitates sharing of data. Voice messages are automatically converted to text, thus eliminating manual text entry. The new feature introduced by Ribbit allows “conditional call forwarding” wherein calls made by Ribbit customers get forwarded to Ribbit’s Web-based platform which diverts the data to Salesforce.

“We’re targeting a different and important area like Salesforce Professional Edition or customers who have got a team of people relying on their cell phone to do their job,” said Greg Goldfarb, general manager of software as a service at Ribbit , in a statement. “Such products are interdependent on having a certain type of infrastructure.”

Kapow Technologies develops enterprise mashups that intends to make business intelligence more pervasive in an enterprise setup. One such product Kapow OnDemand gathers relevant data from the net and adds it to a spreadsheet. This eliminates manual drudgery and the man hours saved can be utilized more effectively in doing more productive work.

“Today’s CRM application users are tapping half a dozen other Web resources to populate their databases and get their jobs done,” said Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Kapow Technologies.

Amdocs Limited has reported that for the most recent quarter that ended March 31, 2008, it achieved revenue of $774.3 million. This is almost a 10% increase over earnings in the past year for the same period.

Dov Baharav, chief executive officer of Amdocs Management Limited, said the company’s officials “recognize that there is uncertainty in the market as economic conditions have become more challenging and we believe that our forecasts for the second half of this fiscal year take this into account.”

In the second quarter Amdocs showed progress in the operational support systems area by winning a deal with a large North American service provider, according to company officials: “In Europe, Amdocs signed an important CRM deal with a large wireless carrier,” they said, noting “several wins with wireless carriers including a consulting engagement to help a service provider introduce offerings.”

An article on the website Customer Strategy titled CRM: The comeback kid has an element of humor for me. I mean it’s becoming so regularly monotonous to hear that CRM is going strong/will make a comeback inspite of so many deployment failures. I guess if there is one technology that is making its vendors and promoters millions more on promise and less on delivery of promises, its CRM.

The enticement of a vendor pitch backed with figures, charts, graphs, promises, and maybe a success story would be too strong for a company to resist. More than that, it is the desires inherent with every business, which CRM purports to fulfill and the confidence that “we will do it right, god willing” is what drives companies to flirt with CRM. That’s my guess.

A new CMO Council study only confirms what most business owners begin to suspect after investing a few hundred dollars in CRM and not getting any results.  Marketers generally fail to make proper use of CRM data. Of the companies studied in the report, only 16 percent rated themselves as effective with CRM; the majority felt that they had some distance to go before they could get the best by leveraging and integrating customer data.

“There is a lack of focus as to how to optimize revenue from existing customers,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, New York. “In a year of economic restraints, marketers should be more concerned with cross-selling and upselling.”

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Soffront has won the 2008 CRM Excellence Award given every year by the Technology Marketing Corporation Customer Interaction Solutions® magazine. The magazine has been delivering quality CRM information since 1982.

“We are pleased to receive this prestigious award for the third year in a row,” said Manu Das, Soffront president and founder. “As the leader of mid-market CRM software, we offer a comprehensive solution that helps our customers throughout their entire organization, improving productivity, enhancing customer satisfaction, and increasing profitability. When compared with other mid-market CRM solutions, we continue to lead the competition in configuration, price, and functionality.”

Read more here.

Bungee Labs™ has announced the release of its development and hosting platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to build web applications that integrate SaaS CRM applications that have hitherto worked in isolated silos. CRM solutions from companies as diverse as NetSuite, Oracle, and Salesforce.com can be integrated with multiple data sources ERP systems, Microsoft Exchange, scheduling and inventory management applications, and e-commerce APIs, including Amazon, eBay and PayPal.

SugarCRM has announced its CRM Acceleration World Tour which will commence in Atlanta on Thursday, April 10th and cover 15 cities across 10 continents. The tour will cover Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York City, Frankfurt, London, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. It is being sponsored by IBM and RIM. The objective of the CRM Acceleration sessions is to help businesses learn more about the manner in which they should devise and implement CRM strategies. These intense one-day sessions include presentations from CRM visionaries, in-depth product sessions, real-world demo scenarios, expert panels and customer testimonials. The presentations cover both the business and technical aspects of the software.

“CRM Accelerations help companies cut through the time-consuming, and often frustrating, process of evaluating and implementing customer relationship management technology,” said John Roberts, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM. “In just one day executives can see the product in action, formulate a deployment plan and meet the right people to accelerate their CRM strategy.”

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