By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lou Reed's majestic "Rock'n'Roll" from Rock'n'Roll Animal, right now it's at the part where Lou's finished singing the lyrics and is repeating the rhythm guitar riff to a hypnotic degree, Prakash John's bass is picking it up, any second now Steve Hunter'll come blazing in with one of the greatest song-ending solos anywhere… wait for it… the drums, yes… here we go!
Kintera Inc. has announced it is incorporating LiquidScore into Kintera Sphere CRM as an included service for all users.
This means the nonprofit organizations using Kintera's CRM product will have the ability to automatically score and group their supporter base into wealth segments, company officials say, adding that the foundation of Kintera's social CRM platform, Kintera Sphere CRM, will provide "a novel wealth score" based on supporters' liquid financial assets.
The LiquidScore data will be provided for all supporters housed in Kintera Sphere CRM with a valid residential address and matches to approximately 90 percent of individuals.
The score enables nonprofit organizations to segment their supporter database by capacity to donate. As a result, nonprofits can customize "ask" amounts based on a donor's ability to give, resulting, so the thinking goes, in more successful fundraising efforts.
"Kintera is making the power of LiquidScore analytics available at no charge to all of our nonprofit clients using Kintera Sphere CRM," said Harry Chiu, senior vice president of product management.
Kintera claims to have demonstrated "significant return on investment (ROI) improvements" in direct mail campaigns conducted by nonprofits, including organizations in the faith-based, education and healthcare sectors, in which "ask" amounts were segmented based on a liquid financial assets scoring system.
"Analytics with continuous updates are an integral part of social CRM," said Harry E. Gruber, M.D., Kintera CEO, adding "only SaaS providers are able to cost-effectively and automatically deliver data with continuous updates."
LiquidScore analytics will be integrated with the other features of Kintera's social CRM platform. Nonprofits will be able to use Kintera's personalization features in communications, such as e-mail or Web content, to present targeted content to particular supporter segments based on wealth and affinity.
The wealth segments created in Kintera Sphere CRM can also be used as a prequalification system, resulting in better ROI for money spent on additional analytics. In Kintera's SaaS model, wealth segmentation occurs automatically with the addition of every new supporter to the database. Wealth scores will be automatically refreshed on a regular basis to report when supporters' conditions have changed and thereby alter communications.
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CoreTrac, Inc., provider of ResourceOne, a CRM/Sales Force Automation product built specifically for community financial institutions, has announced that fifteen additional banks have selected ResourceOne to help manage customer relationships.
Rather an interesting list of bank names, not as boring as you might think a list of bank names would be. Some of First Coffee's favorites: Ravenswood Bank in Chicago, Soy Capital Bank & Trust down the road from Chicago in Decatur, Happy State Bank in Happy, Texas, Celtic Bank in Salt Lake City, Mauch Chunk Trust Company in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank in Harwich Port, and Cornhusker Bank in Lincoln, Nebraska, in whose parking lot all cars with Oklahoma license plates are ticketed $10.
Alan Buhler, VP Sales & Marketing, CoreTrac, said the company's CRM/Sales Force Automation product provides "greater pipeline visibility, custom marketing campaigns, product recommendations based on customer demographics, call center tracking, compensation management, and incentive tracking."
CoreTrac, Inc. is a privately held corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas.
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SAP Arabia, the Middle East business arm of SAP AG, has announced that Saudi Arabia's General Investment Authority has deployed the mySAP ERP and mySAP Customer Relationship Management enterprise software applications to" increase and improve its handling of international inward investment opportunities," according to SAP Arabia officials.
Executives with SAGIA say that the best practice and case management experience built into the mySAP CRM software application is what encouraged them to choose SAP technology over other providers of enterprise resource planning (ERP) products.
"The business benefits of this new SAP CRM deployment for SAGIA are real and immediate," said Amr Al-Dabbagh, SAGIA's Governor.
By better managing our interaction with our customers and by improving our case management capabilities, SAGIA officials say they expect to "improve its international competitiveness standing vis-à-vis other countries, as ranked annually by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation."
In the Middle East, SAP Arabia increased its market share from 30.2 per cent in 2004 to 33.1 per cent in 2005 while its nearest competitor, according to SAP officials, has a market share of 23.3 per cent. Total spending on software solutions in the MENA (Middle East-North Africa) region reached $187.35 million in 2005, representing an increase of 16 per cent year-on-year and is expected to be worth around $ 371.08 million in 2010.
Saudi Arabia was the largest market in that with 43.9 per cent share and the UAE second with 26.8 per cent share of the regional market in 2005.
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Open Solutions Inc. has announced that Tampa-based GTE Federal Credit Union has implemented Open Solutions' enterprise-wide data processing platform, The Complete Credit Union Solution, and "other complementary products."
Open Solutions sells enabling technologies for financial institutions in the United States, Canada and other international markets.
With more than $2 billion in assets, 39 branches and approximately a quarter million members, GTE is expanding both through acquisitions and member growth. Based on open architecture, Open Solutions' sophisticated member-centric relational data processing platform is now the underlying core technology for all of GTE's product and service delivery initiatives.
"Prior to the implementation, we relied on the same system for 23 years," said GTE Senior Vice President of IT John Thompson.
GTE is also implementing Open Solutions' cView for CRM/business intelligence, among other products. The credit union is comprised of more than 1,400 select employee groups and averages approximately 3,500 new members every month.
Open Solutions Chairman and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. said his company is "placing even more resources behind our Implementation Department."
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Callidus Software Inc, a vendor of Sales Performance Management and Enterprise Incentive Management products, has announced a partnership with CelFocus, a provider of consulting services to mobile telecommunications operators.
The agreement represents Callidus Software's first industry-specific alliance and is supposed to provide mobile communication firms with EIM products. Callidus and CelFocus will offer SPM and EIM software and integration to common mobile communications systems, such as Billing, ERP and CRM.
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