May 2007 Archives

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Beatles' Abbey Road:

Princeton Softech, a vendor of enterprise data management, has announced that Australian Newspaper Network, News Limited, has purchased Princeton Softech Optim Siebel Solution to manage continued data growth and improve operational efficiencies following a planned Siebel upgrade.

Optim's enterprise data management solutions help companies implement a proactive approach for faster, safer upgrades.

The News Limited newspaper network includes over 110 national, metropolitan, regional and community newspapers that reach into all areas of Australia and account for more than 70 percent of the country's circulation. Additionally, the organization has online and magazine divisions.

To keep its critical Siebel applications current and get the newest functionality and enhancements, News Limited is planning to upgrade its Siebel implementation from version 6.3 to 7.8.

Siebel's version 7.8 offers enhanced capabilities for modules like Order Management, which can help companies process customer orders, and Business Analytics, which can help businesses analyze subsequent client data.

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FYI: Robert Kear, an expert on marketing and CRM strategy, will join the CRM panel at the June 21 Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference. The panel discussion, titled "Keys to Successful CRM User Adoption," will share ideas on how to align process with technology and how to drive up user adoption.

Kear, chief marketing officer and partner of Sales Performance International, Inc., a global sales performance improvement firm, will explore with the panel why CRM has failed to improve sales productivity and why a successful technology implementation doesn't mean successful use of the application.

Selling Power's publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner will moderate the discussion. Other panelists include: Eric Berridge, CEO, Bluewolf Group, Joe Gustafson, CEO, Brainshark, Inc., and Jason Jordan, Principal, Mercer Sales Effectiveness Consulting.

"After nearly two decades of evolution, the question remains for CRM – how does it actually enable sales professionals to better understand and address their customers' problems? As companies move from products to solutions, the technology imperative is to enhance the business acumen and insight of the front line, which has not been the traditional goal of CRM. So we need to challenge what "technology enablement" means for effective selling, and consider CRM in that context," said Kear.

Kear recently coauthored The Solution-Centric Organization (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Before joining SPI, Kear was VP, marketing strategy and CRM strategy, for JD Edwards & Company. The Sales Leadership Conference will be held Philadelphia at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel on June 21, 2007. Invitations can be requested online.

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Finland's VV-Auto Group has acquired a customer relationship management system from Infor Global Solutions.

"In line with its strategy," company officials said, "VV-Auto Group Oy continues to focus heavily on the development of customer relationship management and is acquiring a CRM system from Infor Global Solutions."

The Infor CRM Epiphany system selected had the customer relationship management tools required, company officials say, adding that the system will serve the imports, retailing and after-sales services of Volkswagen passenger cars and commercial vehicles, and Audi passenger cars.

The system will be "built to serve the needs of the whole network, and its implementation will be phased to start at the beginning of 2008," company officials say. The plan is to implement the system throughout the retail network in 2008 and 2009.

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Dow Jones & Company and salesforce.com have announced the availability of Dow Jones Wealth Manager for salesforce.com's AppExchange.

This means financial advisors using salesforce.com will have Dow Jones Wealth Manager's Client News Match capabilities, which map Dow Jones information to custom client profiles, "spurring the personalized client communication that builds client loyalty and a strong, profitable customer base," salesforce officials say.

Built using the Salesforce platform, Dow Jones Wealth Manager is available for test drive and deployment from the Financial Services category on the AppExchange.

Salesforce.com customers can deploy Dow Jones Wealth Manager via the AppExchange to create a client-loyalty engine. Advisors can add their clients' individual holdings and interests into their contacts in Salesforce, and Dow Jones Wealth Manager returns Client News Matches from Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal and other sources mapped to client-specific investments and professional and personal interests.

Tom Waite, vice president, partners and alliances, Dow Jones, said a study from CEG Research found that "successful wealth managers build client relationships through regular and personalized client contact, and that clients want an average of 28 contacts per year from their advisor."

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According to the latest report from Compass Intelligence, businesses in the US will spend roughly $9.0 billion on CRM and other mobile applications by 2011.

This year American businesses are expected to spend an estimated $3.8 billion on mobile applications, which include mobile and wireless-based custom-coded and packaged applications, including productivity, Enterprise Resource Planning, e-mail, CRM, security applications, and more.

This market is poised for double-digit annual growth into 2011 and is primarily targeted to improve productivity and collaboration across businesses. Major trends in this industry include growth in productivity-based applications, growth in sophisticated and business-oriented devices, and a major attraction to service providers to strengthen profit margins.

Compass Intelligence recently released a series of market forecasts and reports on mobile applications in the US, all part of a new subscription services called Applications.

Compass's research also found that the Professional Services and Government industries are expected to be the two largest spenders on US mobile applications, representing 37 and 22 percent respectively in 2007, and the small business segment with 38 percent and enterprise business with 42 percent are expected to be the largest spenders on mobile applications from 2006-2011.

Major mobile applications include e-mail, SMS/Text Messaging, CRM, project management, and collaboration and file sharing.

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WorkWise, Inc., vendor of products designed to help manufacturers use information assets, has announced the release of Version 8.2 of its Time Critical Manufacturing (TCM) suite of ERP applications.

TCM Version 8.2 is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. This feature rich release is a prelude to TCM V8.2SQL which is scheduled for release fall 2007.

New functionality is the cornerstone of Version 8.2 from WorkWise and includes direct fulfillment, which allows the calculation of a promise date based of available capacity and material and the scheduling of a shop order directly from Customer Order Processing all from a single screen, and TCM CRM (Customer Relationship Management), supporting opportunity tracking, marketing campaigns, account management, customer service, and full MS Outlook integration.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is some Coleman Hawkins, some Clifford Brown and Max Roach:

Enforta has announced that it has commissioned its network and started to offer services in the regional capitals of Voronezh and Penza.

Networks in the cities of Ulyanovsk, Tula, and Yaroslavl are also operational and awaiting final regulatory consents. Services in Krasnoyarsk and Samara will be commissioned during June and July.

"We expand our service area by another 6 million people with the inclusion of these additional seven cities", said Victor Ratnikov, Enforta's General Director, adding that Enforta now operates "the largest wireless broadband 'footprint' in Russia covering a total of 25 regional capitals with over 50 million people."

Enforta has also announced that it expects to begin deploying the new Alvarion "BreezeMax 5200' product upon obtaining final Russian certifications during Q3.

"Enforta is unique in operating networks at both the 3.5 GHz and 5.2 GHz licensed frequencies", said Lee Sparkman, Enforta's President, adding that in his opinion enterprises will appreciate the "high data throughput and stability of 'BreezeMax 5200'" products, while consumers and small business will appreciate "the simplicity of self-installed equipment supported by 'BreezeMax 3500'."

Enforta plans to begin services in an additional eight cities during the second half of 2007.

"There are no 'silver bullets' when it comes to providing broadband services," Sparkman said, but going forward "Enforta will have the flexibility to deploy either Alvarion BreezeMax 3500, ideal for consumers and small business requiring self-installable equipment, or BreezeMAX 5200 for high performance, mission critical, enterprise applications, or both."      

Enforta was formed in October, 2003 with the objective to provide broadband services using WiMAX and other advanced technologies in Russia's regional capitals. It's owned by Sumitomo Corporation, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, EBRD, and its management team.

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Customer Effective, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and provider of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, has implemented CRM to address the growing sales and customer service needs of Formetco, which for 40 years has been one of the largest full service suppliers to the Outdoor Advertising Industry.

Product line expansions and increased customer demands triggered Formetco's need to replace their contact management system.

Working with a team from Formetco, Customer Effective led the implementation by determining CRM objectives and mapping a plan to interface the system with Microsoft Great Plains. With the integration to Great Plains, Formetco has single point access to complete customer data.

"We now have a total sales system where nothing slips through the cracks," says Jock Gibb, vice president of sales. "All follow-up calls and scheduled activity are captured in CRM. Overall, we now have better customer service."

Customer Effective is headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina with a sole focus on Microsoft CRM.

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A recently released report from Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC), a analyst firm specializing in impartial enterprise software evaluations, cites increasing interest in on-demand sales compensation management applications.

Authored by principal analyst P.J. Jakovljevic and issued as a four-part series beginning on May 7th, the report marks the latest industry analyst research on sales incentive compensation management (ICM) and sales performance management (SPM).

Last month, Gartner published a report entitled "Sales Incentive Compensation Management Achieves Operational Benefits, but Must Focus on Strategic Value." SiriusDecisions also issued an April brief entitled "Incentive Compensation, the Systematic Way."

The TEC report, titled "On Demand Delivery Compels a Compensation Management Vendor," claims that newer SaaS-model applications "feature the on-demand functionality that, at the very least, matches the capabilities of on-premise counterparts."

A full copy of the TEC report can be viewed at www.technologyevaluation.com.

In March of this year, Aberdeen Group released a report titled "Incentive Compensation Management: Aligning Compensation with Business Goals." The full Aberdeen report can be viewed at www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410674&cid=3951.

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Interesting comments published today by Reading, England-based Brendan Peo, Country Manager of CRM vendor HansaWorld UK, on the synergies between VoIP and CRM.

"There are two problems with the IP telephony hype," Peo says. "First, IP telephony probably won't save you as much as you'll end up spending on extra hardware to maintain call quality. The promise of cost savings is a red herring."

But there's a bigger problem, Peo says, which is that most people punting IP telephony completely miss the point about its real value: "They're stuck in a 130-year-old mindset in which telephony begins and ends with the ability for two people to talk when they're apart. We've added some embellishments -- voice mail, caller ID, call forwarding -- but it's still all about talking. If all that has changed is the way the voice signal is carried, then nothing has changed."

The bigger point Peo thinks most people are missing is that if voice becomes just another data stream, "then we can mix it up and enrich it with other data streams. Once we do that -- once we connect our phone systems to our financial and customer records -- a world of opportunities opens up. We start being able to extract business from a system that was previously just part of the furniture."

Link caller ID with other information, for example, and suddenly when customers call their profiles pop up on your screen even before you've answered, he says: "You can see everything from outstanding invoices through what happened last time the customer called the company, to how profitable this account is."

When this happens, "your CRM system simply is your address book, and it automatically tracks every phone call, SMS or e-mail exchanged with every customer," Peo notes. "This way a customer database is always up to date and shared throughout the organization… that's the true value of IP telephony: forget about saving pennies on phone calls and look instead to the new business it can create."

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PacificNet, Inc., a vendor of gaming technology, e-commerce, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in China, has announced that it has opened an office in Zhuhai, a city adjacent to Macau, as a product development and R & D center to support its PacificNet Games Limited (PactGames) Macau office.

Zhuhai's availability of" stable IT professionals, an educated and cost-effective workforce, a healthy and clean living environment, and continuous software and IT training offered by numerous local colleges and universities, as well as government incentives and supportive policies," influenced the choice, PacificNet officials said.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Hootie & the Blowfish's "I'm Goin' Home:"

Customer Connect Associates, long affiliated with Microsoft, has become a Microsoft Certified Partner for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Connect officials say, adding that the "Certified Partner" designation recognizes "expertise and the total impact that Customer Connect has had upon the CRM marketplace."

Customer Connect President Geoff Ables said the company's goal is to reach the level of Microsoft Gold Certified "within the next twelve months."

Earlier this month Customer Connect Associates was retained by ClearWater Marketing to implement Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy and products.

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Industry observer Howard Dahdah in Sydney reports that Vodafone's CRM brownout was expected: "A customer relationship management (CRM) upgrade that caused Vodafone Group's pre-paid service to brown out for more than a week was totally foreseen," according to company officials.

Starting May 17, Dahdah said, the company was upgrading its Oracle's Siebel system handling its Australian pre-paid billing system.

So for over a week Vodafone couldn't provide such new products or services as voicemail or moving customers to new propositions, or change the rate plans or even churn customers to or from pre-paid phone accounts, Dahdah says, noting "there was no impact to the telecom company's post-pay business."

"This was scheduled as a piece of work. It was not as though we thought it would take a day and it has taken longer. It was certainly a nine-day brown out period that was factored in," Dahdah quotes Greg Spears, Vodafone's head of corporate communications as saying.

Spears added the work is part of the final phase of a three-year upgrade to the company's new CRM system.

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EMS-Cortex, a New Zealand-based IT company with worldwide offices and operations,  has announced Cortex 7.0 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 is available through the Microsoft SPLA and provides "a good opportunity for hosters wishing to move into higher valued hosted services," company officials say. Cortex 7.0, the latest upgrade of EMS-Cortex flagship announced recently, is considered by Cortex officials to be a "major upgrade," featuring a number of enhancements for Microsoft Exchange 2007, SharePoint services 3.0 and new provisioning pack for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

Cortex v7 configures multiple CRM instances and servers to be managed and allows customers to be allocated to a CRM front-end server. Once allocated, user provisioning can be delegated to the end-customer without the need for the CRM administration tools.

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Paris-based DigiCompanion, a download platform specifically designed to enable brands to offer digital gifts to their consumers, has announced its first funding round of 1.7 million euros ($2.3 million).

The round, led by Alven Capital and supported by Ile-de-France Développement, is intended to accelerate the development of DigiCompanion's digital gift download platform and to broaden its catalogue of digital content.

Charles Letourneur, managing partner of Alven Capital, said DigiCompanion's white-labeled platform helps brands to distribute downloadable digital rewards to consumers on mobiles and PC's and to collect CRM data.

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Industry observer Julian Goldsmith has reported a partnership of ten local authorities in Staffordshire, England" has saved millions by consolidating its procurement processes."

Staffordshire Connects -- a joint venture focused around providing customer services, Goldsmith says -- has "invested in contact center and customer relationship management technology on behalf of the local authorities from Macfarlane Telesystems, reaping an initial saving of £1.8 million by buying together."

He notes that up to £1.4 million per year "will also be saved on joint maintenance and operational costs, once the CRM system is able to resolve 80 per cent of service requests at the first point of contact."

One of the leaders of the group, Stoke-on-Trent City Council, has already seen a return on their investment, managing to reach a first-time-resolution rate of 85 per cent.

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West Lindsey District Council has reported going live with the first phase of a three phase Customer Relationship Management implementation from Lagan that is already enabling the Council to "provide a more efficient service to a greater volume of customers -- with 8 fewer staff," Lagan officials say.

Bringing back office services to the front line, and enabling staff to resolve enquiries at the first point of contact, means the council is now able to handle an additional 200+ customer enquiries every week.

The Lagan product forms part of West Lindsey District Council's plans to provide a single point of contact to its 84,000 citizens, as well as meeting targets set out in the Transformational Government strategy. The overall contract, including support and maintenance, is valued in the region of £237,000.

Lyn Marlow, Customer Services, Manager at West Lindsey District Council, said one of the principal drivers for the CRM implementation was "to reduce the number of contact points for our citizens… the turnaround time that it takes to resolve enquiries has already been reduced by 20 percent."

The next phase of implementation will concentrate on expanding the current available processes for self service for West Lindsey's citizens by integrating the CRM system with the Council's Web site."

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Auto/Mate Dealership Systems, ranked the highest for overall customer satisfaction in the last three NADA surveys, has announced that its Customer/Mate CRM system has achieved certification status from GM OneSource.

GM OneSource is the lead management service that General Motors uses to electronically deliver leads to its dealers.

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CRM vendor Vertical Solutions has announced that DPSciences, a Cincinnati-based value-added reseller, has used VSI’s PowerHelp CRM to "triple revenues from its manufacturer maintenance program," Vertical officials say.

DPS uses PowerHelp CRM, a suite of customer-experience management software solutions, to actively manage its maintenance contract renewal process.

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VendorGuru.com is offering two free downloadable white papers: "The 5 Must-Have Features of a CRM Solution" and "The Top 5 Telephony Solutions Your Business Needs Today" at www.vendorguru.com.

VendorGuru.com's new white paper, "The 5 Must-Have Features of a CRM Solution," describes customer relationship management software features that today's businesses find critical for their success, including data tracking and integration to give users throughout the company access to key data.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Clash's Sandinista!:

Before you do anything else -- well, after you finish reading First Coffee -- click on Dr. Bill and Genesys, one of the very few genuinely funny customer service spoof videos. Dr. Phil-style it explores the travails of Sharon and George's relationship issues because Sharon is always on the phone with her less-than-helpful customer service agent.

There are second and third Dr. Bill videos too, dealing with a call center agent who feels inadequate because he is always apologizing to customers, and "Bob," a business executive that refuses to own up to the fact that his company’s contact center has a problem with long wait-times. Trust me, they're worth checking out.

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In today's news, airline customer service is getting worse, and the sun rose in the east this morning. Why? Easy: The industry has absolutely no incentive whatsoever to offer better customer service because whaddya gonna do, take Greyhound from New York to San Francisco? Right. Now get back in line and take off your belt and shoes.

No, you're going to sit in your cramped seat and endure delays and surly service and shut up about it all or get deplaned as a "security risk." You know that, I know that, airlines know that, chimps know that so let's stop pretending customer service matters to airlines, it doesn't because it doesn't have to: Nobody flies airlines for the great customer service.

I've only ever heard of one business traveler who has made an airline decision based on customer service instead of price or schedule or frequent flyer miles, no doubt others have, but they're so few they matter to airlines about as much as smart economists' votes matter to politicians. Check this by observing the level of care paid to customer service by airlines and to solid economic sense by politicians.

In the list of Things Airlines Really Give A Rip About, that real list execs keep taped to the underside of their desks, not the one they trundle out whenever pokenose CRM columnists come calling, things like "price of fuel," "the pilots' union" and "profiling without looking like we're profiling" make the cut, customer service simply gets cut.

If CRM theory holds true, we should be able to determine just why, even in a basically monopolistic situation, customer service has to bite: Because employees are unhappy.

Or we could do this Jeopardy! style: "I'll take 'The Bleedin' Obvious' for $1,000, Alex." The answer is, "Low customer satisfaction." Hit that buzzer -- "What is, 'What does low employee satisfaction ineluctably lead to,' Alex." You're right!

Okay, that's cheating, because employee satisfaction is about the most stable indicator of customer satisfaction as you're going to find. You can save yourself a lot of work if you're researching the correlation between employee and customer satisfaction for a company, simply find the one, print that chart. Print it out again, cross out "employee" or "customer" on top and write in the other one, and you'll be accurate.

Bottom line: If you want your customers to be satisfied, you need to ensure that your employees are. Want proof? Set the Wayback Machine to 1959 in Russia or Bulgaria and check out the customer service provided by people whose employers treated them with contempt and who were paid dirt. Then look at today's airline employees.

The Wall Street Journal, which would be the greatest newspaper in the land if it had comics and a decent sports page, shows how airlines are trying to pitch employee cost-cutting as "customer service." Continental Airlines says "it will begin installing new kiosks at its Newark, N.J., hub later this month that will let customers rebook themselves after they miss connections or have flights canceled by storms," the Journal reports, spinning it thusly: "For travelers, that would be a huge improvement over waiting in an airport line or a telephone queue."

Maybe, but it also requires fewer staff members. Even those airlines dimly aware of the connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction don't seem to grasp the big picture: "Having better morale among employees really helps the operation," Jim Whitehurst, Delta's CEO, correctly notes to Journal columnist Scott McCartney.

So how is Delta improving staff morale? Giving the stews new uniforms. Gee. Thanks. "Customer complaints about in-flight service dropped by half," McCartney notes, without any real cause-effect analysis differentiating Delta's sartorial largesse from its "giving bonuses to employees, instituting profit-sharing and paying 4 percent raises for most workers as it comes out of bankruptcy," practices in reality much more likely to actually increase staff morale, thereby staff performance, thereby customer satisfaction.

Overall, though, it's a grim time for airline employees. Another Journal piece this month looks at how tough it's getting for airlines to find not just good employees, but any employees at all: "Airlines used to offer prestigious jobs with good wages and coveted flight benefits. Now, in the aftermath of aggressive cutbacks, a growing number of airline jobs are more akin to those at a fast-food restaurant. The pay is low, the work is tough."

Your top airlines axed "more than 170,000 workers, or 38 percent of the total, between August 2001 and October 2006… even as the number of passengers flying has returned to pre-9/11 levels. Pay has fallen, sometimes substantially," the Journal says.

Let's see if we can fill in the blank: The number of passengers flying is increasing. Airlines have fewer employees to handle this rise, and what ones they have probably haven't been on the job for too long and aren't being paid a whole lot. Bearing in mind that even airline employees don't enjoy being paid low wages to do someone else's work and get witched at, the quality of customer service will be _________.

It's worse than that, too. Employees feel used, abused and hung out to dry by the airlines, never a great incentive to provide quality customer service. After 9/11 pilots and stewardesses' unions accepted a lot of concessions, like lower pay and benefits, to help the airlines survive. Now that things are better, airline executives are helping themselves to fat performance bonuses, not raising employees' pay or benefits.

"There was shared sacrifice, and we were hoping for shared reward," one pilot, who asked not to be named, said on the Airways4U blog. "It's just not fair. It offends basic human sensibilities." Indeed. Knocking yourself out for such an employer does too: "People may be less willing to twist themselves into a pretzel and forgo a family event to help the airline cover a trip," the pilot threatened darkly.

Airways4U notes that "airline employee morale is at what experts say is a record low." It cites Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pennsylvania saying "there's so much dissatisfaction, and so many employees are burned out. They're working longer hours for less pay in a system that is jammed to the hilt."

Pamela Lopez-Lewis, a Northwest flight attendant for 28 years, recently had her pay cut $15,000. She told the Journal "everybody is reaching their breaking point. Morale is so low. You've been insulted by the pay you're getting. You're not feeling happy. I absolutely think it affects service. Apathy prevails." Customer service suffers.

To help United Airlines out of bankruptcy, the airline's workers lost their pensions, took pay cuts as high as 50 to 60 percent, and agreed to work longer hours. CEO Glenn Tilton let them know he appreciated their sacrifices by pocketing a $40 million bonus in 2006.

"You've got people who've worked hard, given up their pensions, given up their pay, and in some cases given up their future, and you have these executives feasting on the companies. Would you go the extra mile," aviation consultant Michael Boyd said on Airlines4U. Given that attitude you don't need one statistic from an airline customer satisfaction surveys to know that it's in the toilet.

US Airways seems to get it, as McCartney says they're looking to "hire 1,400 additional airport workers by summer." This'll reduce the likelihood of cancelled flights; airlines have regulations for staffing on each flight, so if a flight attendant calls in sick and there's no one to replace her, the flight's cancelled. This happens -- First Coffee has an ex-stewardess friend here in Istanbul who was once so physically ill she had to be dressed in her uniform and literally carried onto a flight so it could take off.

Gussying up hub airports and lobbies, improving in-flight entertainment and food are all well and good, but if they're taking airlines' money and attention away from pleasing employees they're worse than pointless, because he airlines who are taking care of their people are the ones who are taking care of their customers.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Elvis Presley's From Elvis In Memphis, the best actual album he ever released:

CRM vendor NetSuite, Inc. has announced that NetSuite is available wirelessly on mobile devices such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm Treo.

Third-party application developers Antenna Software, Explore Mobile and iEnterprises have extended NetSuite via NetSuite's SuiteFlex development and integration platform to meet the needs of wireless users, providing NetSuite customers with a variety of choices for mobile products.

Unlike stand-alone products typically targeted at only sales users, company officials say, NetSuite is an end-to-end business management software application in the SaaS industry that "allows all mobile users to perform their key business activities from accounts receivable, to quote and order management, to closing transactions and sales, to customer support and service."

Each of these end-to-end processes is now available to the mobile worker via their wireless device with NetSuite extensions from Antenna Software, Explore Mobile and iEnterprises. Users can "have access to key data in real-time and from everywhere to run their business as usual while away from the office," company officials say.

"SuiteFlex," NetSuite's application development and integration platform, is designed to enable the extension of NetSuite to third-party systems, the creation of third-party vertical applications within NetSuite, as well as the customization of end-to-end business processes for any end-user company.

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CinTel Corp. has announced that it has signed a stock purchase agreement to acquire one hundred percent ownership and equity interests of Bluecomm Co. for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $6.5 million.

Bluecomm is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and DBM (Database Marketing) vendor in Korea.

Bluecomm entered the CRM business in 2005 and has special expertise in DBM and what's called "Home Service Center," a term coined in the Korean market, but better known in general as "call center and telemarketing services" products.

The market for outsourcing of call center and telemarketing services in Korea has grown rapidly in recent years and the market size is expected to be larger than $380 million in 2007. CRM, DBM and telemarketing are all fast-growing businesses in the Korea market as well.

Bluecomm has an exclusive contract for hosting HSC for Pizza Hut Korea. Bluecomm is valued at approximately $6.9 million.

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Georgia Heritage Federal Credit Union has announced it has selected Open Solutions Inc.'s COWWW Digital Documents e-Statement product to streamline its document-intensive processes and enhance online member services, Open Solutions officials say.

COWWW Digital Documents, a business unit of Open Solutions, provides information archive and delivery systems for financial institutions. Open Solutions sells integrated, enterprise-wide data processing technologies for banks and credit unions throughout the United States, Canada and other international markets.

Based in Savannah, Georgia, the Georgia Heritage Federal Credit Union cites the enhanced archiving capabilities as the primary reason for selecting Open Solutions.

Kimberly Ford, vice president of marketing of Georgia Heritage Federal Credit Union, said the archiving abilities "will enable our members to access up to 36 months of statements from the comfort of their homes. With one click, our members will be able to read the newsletter, and view draft images and checks all on one page."

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Industry observer Rupi Gohlar has reported that Lastminute.com has appointed Shai Eilon as its new group head of customer relationship management. He replaces Lopo Champalimaud who has taken the role of managing director of the European lifestyle division.

Eilon will be responsible for overseeing the company's CRM program, Gohlar writes, and will report to recently-appointed chief marketing officer Simon Thompson.

He joins from EMI music where he held the same position and was responsible for developing and implementing the eCRM strategy across all music labels. Prior to EMI, he was CRM marketing manager at Amazon.co.uk.

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Sage Software has announced the 10th anniversary edition of Sage SalesLogix (v7.2), with the release coming during the company's Insights 2007 business partner conference.

Sage SalesLogix v7.2 has a "modernized" architecture supporting Web, Mobile and Windows interfaces designed to "increase user productivity through a choice of flexible access methods to centralized and secure customer data," company officials say.

A new Web client enhances usability and reduces IT resource requirements and administration costs. Expanded capabilities for the optional Sage SalesLogix Mobile product add data charting for BlackBerry devices, and support for Windows Mobile and Smartphone devices.

Sage SalesLogix v7.2 also features a common Web and Mobile customization environment, allowing rapid application deployment for one or many users.

"Sage SalesLogix v7.2 can equip the flexible workforce with an affordable CRM product that is easy to manage and gives our customers the freedom to choose the access methods that best suit them," said Ron Verni, Sage Software CEO, adding that the product is standards-based, scalable, and uses Web technologies to simplify integration with IT environments and lower cost of ownership.

Joe Bergera, senior vice president and general manager for Sage Software Global CRM Solutions, called the product "the first milestone of our write once, deploy anywhere strategy."

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Salesforce.com is quite proud of being named one of the world's most ethical companies by Ethisphere magazine, a national publication "dedicated to illuminating the correlation between ethics and profit," according to publication officials.

The list of fewer than 100 companies, including Google, Kellogg Company, Starbucks and Whole Foods, were recognized for their "strong leadership in ethics and compliance, advancement of industry discourse on social and ethical issues, and positive engagement in the communities in which they operate."

"Having a purpose beyond making a profit distinguishes our company," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Corporate social responsibility has been integrated into our DNA from the very beginning through our innovative One Percent model -- one percent equity, product and employee time are given back to the community, and we have a commitment to be one with the earth. It's an honor to be recognized for practicing what we preach."

Among other awards, salesforce.com was the recipient of the 2006 Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy Excellence Award, as well as ranked No. 7 on the list of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens by Business Ethics magazine.

Editors of Ethisphere chose organizations after reviewing the companies' codes of ethics, litigation and regulatory infraction histories, evaluating companies' investment in innovation and sustainable business practices, looking at activities designed to improve corporate citizenship, studying nominations from senior executives, industry peers, suppliers and customer; and working with consumer action groups for feedback and rating.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music, in honor of Bobby Zimmerman's turning 66 today, is The Bootleg Series No. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue:

Too many vendors forget about large swathes of the economy which could benefit from their products. Kudos to Biz IT Pro and PYA Wise for realizing that managing church congregations, volunteers and events is more than a full-time job. Churches are turning to technology to support their organizational, financial and relationship management needs, which is why Business IT Professionals, a customer relationship management (CRM) product provider, has partnered with PYA Wise Software Solutions, a vendor of Microsoft-based management products.

The two firms will focus on developing customizable technology products to churches nationwide. Churches working with the firms will "find their processes become more streamlined, relationships become more manageable and their overall performance improves," officials of both firms say.

"Aligning with PYA will enable us to use our mastery of Microsoft CRM to create products that will make an impact on churches and religious organizations across the country," states Steve Noe, President of Biz IT Pro. "The applications we have developed have the potential to revolutionize the way churches are organized," adds Bill Walker, Co-Managing Director of PYA.

PYA Wise Software Solutions is a Florida-based vendor of Microsoft-based financial, customer relationship and supply-chain management products to small and mid-market companies.

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Talisma Corporation, a vendor of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) products, has announced that Mimeo.com, an online, on-demand printing vendor, has selected the unified Talisma CIM Suite.

Prior to deploying Talisma, Mimeo's could not provide the type of customer experience it wanted.  They wanted a product that could improve agent productivity and efficiency, and deflect inbound phone calls to other communication channels.

Peter Brau, Director of Customer Service for Mimeo, said the main reason they selected Talisma is because the product integrates with salesforce.com."

Mimeo is deploying the Talisma CIM suite which integrates Talisma Chat, Talisma Email, and Talisma Knowledgebase via salesforce.com's AppExchange. The CIM suite's case management capabilities will help Mimeo agents by providing single-click access to the Salesforce customer account and case information, automatically opening or retrieving cases, capturing disposition codes, and updating the customer record with relevant customer interactions. 

The product also enables users to view a complete history of interactions across all communication channels so agents are presented with a 360 degree view of the customer.

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Relationals, a vendor of customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) for the newspaper industry, has announced that The E. W. Scripps Company has selected Relationals as its company-wide CRM platform.

Linda Sease, Vice President of Newspaper Marketing for Scripps, said the product "simplifies sales processes, adds a critical layer of collaboration, and enables effective targeting of potential advertisers with greater accuracy and more measurable results."

Based on success at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and other properties, Scripps is positioned to roll out Relationals to all of its newspaper properties. The newspaper chain plans to use Relationals to "execute opportunity-generating telesales and e-mail campaigns, enable account activity monitoring, integrate sales efforts with existing business systems, and consistently collaborate around the sales process," officials say.

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Industry observer Marc Songini has reported on a survey released by Accenture finding that "most consumers of high technology products say that use of customer relationship management (CRM) software by their vendors has not improved their service offerings - and in many cases has made it worse."

Accenture noted that such consumer dissatisfaction has a ripple effect on vendors, Songini writes, adding that "73 percent of those surveyed said that mere 'average' service would prompt them to consider evaluating products of other vendors."

The consulting firm in March surveyed 1,200 technology consumers and 35 executives at high technology companies about their experiences with automated service systems.

"This is a wake-up call that customer service should no longer be relegated to a mere instrument for extracting costs out of the business," Brett Anderson, managing director for CRM in Accenture's communications and high tech practice, said in a prepared announcement. "With so many technology products on a natural path to commoditization, technology companies need to use customer service to differentiate themselves from competitors."

As Songini says, one of the "more sobering statistics" is that "42 percent of the customers reported that they had to access CRM channels multiple times to resolve a problem, while 61 percent said automated service systems doesn't speed resolution."

Disconnects abound: The survey "noted that 58 percent of customers using CRM systems believe that their customer service is average or below average, while 75 percent of vendor executives surveyed said they believed automated systems are providing 'above average' service to their customers."

And as Songini notes, "about 77 percent of vendor executives said that self-service CRM systems have had a positive impact on their businesses. And 93 percent of those executives contended that CRM systems have speeded problem resolution and 74 percent said the technology has directly led to higher customer satisfaction."

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Xtime, which sells CRM products to service operations, has announced that the Ferman Automotive Group of Tampa, Florida has committed to a group-wide rollout of Xtime's flagship software product, ServiceCRM.

Xtime's ServiceCRM software combines consumer Web scheduling, service BDC automation, shop control and service marketing into one product for automotive service departments. The product's selling point is to help "schedule and manage more service appointments per day."

Over the past five years, dealership service operations have experienced increased challenges. With decreased warranty claims, lower profits on new car sales and customers that demand higher levels of service, dealers are scrambling to find new ways to increase revenue.

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SAS, a vendor of business intelligence products, has announced new, enhanced versions of three of its suite of performance management products: SAS Financial Management, SAS Human Capital Management and SAS Strategic Performance Management.

The latest version of SAS Financial Management "improves the accuracy, relevance and timeliness of financial plans, budgets and reports while promoting the alignment and execution of strategy," company officials say.

Enhanced SAS Human Capital Management provides "a holistic workforce view, human capital scorecarding and predictive analytics to optimize and align human capital strategies," according to SAS officials, and the SAS Strategic Performance Management product is billed as helping executives "focus the entire organization on the initiatives and key performance indicators that support their goals."

The announcements came at SAS Forum 2007.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Slim Dusty's "A Pub With No Beer:"

Somehow missed the news a couple weeks ago when DataForceLEADS Version 2.0 was released, but it's the latest in the DataForce CRM suite of online sales tools designed to "enhance sales results" while making the user experience "simple and comfortable."

Using a technology called Data Grids, this new version allows the user to enter and edit information in one view similar to updating an Excel spreadsheet without the clicks and drill downs in traditional applications.

It has what it calls a simple user interface "designed to ensure 100 percent user adoption Ajax-XML architecture, including Data Grids for fast data entry and edits."

Data is exchanged between Excel spreadsheets and DataForceLEADS by a Copy and Paste feature, and a new layer of analytics blankets both the CRM tool and the Revenue Management module. Its project management allows editing and tracking of sales cycles, and the enhanced sales channel management has automatic lead and opportunity routing and updating, integrated sales forecasting ending and spreadsheet roll ups.

Jim Romano, DataForce founder and CEO, says the service is priced at only $20 per user per month with no ongoing service fees, and "complete and unlimited training is provided at no cost and also includes live chat, message boards and video demonstrations to support our clients."

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Overall, the largest portion -- fully 50 percent -- of software professionals expect to increase their IT development spending with Microsoft more than any other company, according to respondents of a recent Evans Data Corporation study.

In a study designed to clearly articulate the opinions and attitudes of software professionals, Microsoft ranked highest for expected increases in IT spending. Other vendors ranked in this survey were: SAP, Apple, IBM, Sun, Adobe, BEA, Oracle, AMD, Intel, Cisco, HP, Computer Associates, Compuware and Borland.

While many new vendors are taking advantage of the emergence of virtualization, SOA, software as a service and Enterprise 2.0, it is still those incumbents who continue to enhance their product roadmaps and, in some cases, their pricing models who are forecast to benefit the greatest in IT spending, Evans Data officials say, adding that these incumbents enjoy the greatest revenue growth due to their focus on the key enterprise priorities of applications integration, security, cost cutting, business intelligence, ERP/CRM and web based applications development.

The study, based on interviews with over 380 active developers, also found that the top three companies developers expect to see an increase in their Application Development spending with next year are SAP (54 percent), Microsoft (50 percent), BEA (44 percent).

The companies developers expect to see an increase in their Service Oriented Adoption spending with next year are SAP (41 percent), BEA (40 percent), IBM (34 percent).

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The higher education CRM market is getting pretty lucrative these days. The latest news is Jenzabar, Inc., a vendor of software and services for higher education, has announced that Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire is now fully live on the latest version of Jenzabar CX -- version 8.1, an ERP product designed specifically for higher education. In partnership with Jenzabar, the College completed the final stage of their ERP implementation early this year.

Saint Anselm College is currently finishing implementation of its Jenzabar Constituent Relationship Modules (CRMs).

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Everybody's jumping in CRM: Verde Energy, which provides quotes on solar power, solar thermal, and wind power projects, has announced the deployment of a customer relationship management (CRM) portal for its nationwide network of renewable energy contractors known as Verde Pros.

Verde Energy launched the CRM portal, hosted by Salesforce.com, to provide lead delivery and customer life cycle management tools.

Extending the services available to Verde Pros, the CRM portal offers a platform for the management of Verde Energy qualified leads and the ability to schedule follow-up, store contract details and site notes, and manage their sales.

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Infoglide Software Corporation has announced that it will deliver a new insurance product aimed at tackling identity fraud that incorporates CRM and other technology from Sun Microsystems.

The product brings together technology and domain expertise to create Identity Focused Insurance products, designed to "enhance fraud detection while preserving customer service," company officials say.

The product will have the ability to tie fraud risk analysis to the claim process in real-time and is now available in the United Kingdom.

Infoglide Software's Identity Resolution Engine uses Similarity Search technology to resolve the identities of people or items that are of critical interest to the insurer, even through input errors and attempts to deceive. Identity resolution software supports improved customer service, supply chain management, and claims handling by distinguishing who's who, and who knows who, within the claims process.

Infoglide Software's IRE, company officials say, ensures that the insurer's data sources -- including claims, employees, Special Investigation Unit "watch" lists, and CRM -- are used to give a truly three dimensional view of all identities and entities within the claim.

Identity Resolution Engine, through its integration with Sun Microsystems' Java Composite Application Suite, can be applied to multiple areas of an insurer's business and is part of Sun Microsystems Claim's First Notice of Loss, recently launched at SunLive 2007.

"Infoglide Software's Identity Resolution Engine allows insurers to know who's who as they conduct business. Whether it's recognizing when their customers seek to defraud, or when employees attempt to circumvent policies, IRE adds significant value to any insurer," says David Piesse, global head of insurance for Sun.

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Surado Solutions, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products for small to medium sized enterprises, has announced that its flagship products Surado Enterprise CRM 5.1 and Surado Small Business CRM 5.1 will now include project management capabilities that tightly integrate with MS Project Manager.

Introduced last August, the Project Management Features are now part of the core Surado CRM product lines. Surado CRM Project Manager includes the ability to create and manage projects, tasks, sub-tasks and associated activities.

In addition, users will be able to assign and track resources, budgets, status, project timelines and project managers. Because the Surado Project Manager is part of the core product line, it links projects to individuals and vice versa.  These individuals may be users of the system and/or other third parties linked to a project.

Surado Project Manager integrates with Microsoft Project Manager so users can migrate project information data between Microsoft and Surado.  In MS Project, users will be able to view the project using Microsoft’s graphing capabilities.  In Surado, the Projects will be linked to other areas of the CRM system to provide a true 360 degree view.

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Tomorrow being Bob Dylan's 66th birthday, no doubt you are currently wondering if you should honor the day with multiple playings of Blonde On Blonde, Blood On the Tracks, Highway 61 Revisited or Bringing It All Back Home.

First Coffee recommends rediscovering the vastly underrated Nashville Skyline instead.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the songs on my iPod arranged from largest file size to smallest, the good ol' uncompressed, 80, 90, 110 MB files copied directly off CD with that full sound you don't get out of those skinny li'l ole 4.5 MB iTunes downloads, starting at the top, with Elton John's "Funeral For A Friend," Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna," David Bowie's "Station To Station" from the live Stage album… the Redwoods Of The IPod.

Certeon, a vendor selling "Application Intelligent Networking" for application access over wide area networks, has announced that its S-Series Application Acceleration Appliances have received the "Designed for EMC Documentum" logo designation. 

The Certeon S-Series Application Acceleration Appliances uses Application Acceleration Blueprint software to identify network traffic streams that need to be accelerated.  The "Designed for EMC Documentum" accreditation demonstrates that the Application Acceleration Blueprint for EMC Documentum Content Server and eRoom collaboration software have successfully met a comprehensive set of criteria for design, development and implementation.  

In addition to the accreditation, Certeon is announcing a referral relationship to try to get the EMC sales force to engage Certeon for delivering collaborative Enterprise Content Management (ECM) products based on Certeon's S-Series appliances.

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Satuit Technologies has announced that Fund Evaluation Group LLC, a provider of advisory services to institutional investment clients, has selected Satuit as its customer relationship management (CRM) provider of choice.

After a "thorough evaluation of various vendors and products from very simplistic project management tools to robust CRM products," Satuit officials say, "the final decision was between Microsoft CRM and SatuitCRM."

"We chose Satuit Technologies because of their focus on the financial services industry, and our ability to use their product 'out-of-the box,'" reports Anthony Festa, CFA, Managing Principal at Fund Evaluation Group.

FEG chose the On-Demand delivery of SatuitCRM over the On-Premise option.

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And for their part, Microsoft has announced that Security Associates International, a provider of automated security services, has selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM to "unite its disparate technology systems and create a one-stop experience for its customers," Microsoft officials say.

The Arlington Heights, Illinois company replaced its Siebel CRM system with Microsoft CRM software to gear up for growth -- SAI expects its customer accounts to quadruple this year and then double again next year.

"When we were a much smaller company, we could get by using less sophisticated methods, including e-mail and sticky notes to keep track of the different systems and locations where we had customer information stored," said Paul Lucking, chief operating officer of SAI, half-nostalgically.

SAI officials said they considered customer relationship management systems from SugarCRM Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and other companies until it calculated that total cost of ownership would be as much as 50 percent more than with Microsoft CRM because of the higher cost of installing and supporting these products.

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This add-on product is designed for companies wanting to execute simple, targeted e-mail campaigns with their Pivotal CRM product. Customers looking for a product to manage more complex, multi-channel enterprise marketing campaigns can use CDC MarketFirst, an adaptive marketing automation and lead management product that is sold as a stand-alone product and is also integrated with Pivotal CRM.

Syndmail is integrated with Pivotal CRM and features Web-based customer preferences and opt-in/out administration, response tracking including read, click-through and bounce backs, a bounce-back engine to monitor and report bad e-mails and analysis and reporting on customer responses and interaction. Approximately 25 customers in North America are currently using Syndmail with their Pivotal CRM systems.

Bruce Cameron, senior vice president of CDC Software's CRM Solutions, said the product is "built entirely within the Pivotal CRM tool set, providing out of the box integration with the Pivotal CRM applications."

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Consona, a CRM vendor, has announced the release of Onyx Adaptive CRM Version 6.0, KNOVA v7.1, and Million Handshakes v4.5, "just 10 months after the company's entry into the customer relationship management market with the acquisition of Onyx Software Corporation," company officials say.

Jeff Tognoni, CEO of Consona Corporation, said their CRM product is pitched towards "medium- and large-sized businesses."

The Consona CRM release "presents a full suite of functionality," company officials say, including sales, service, support, and marketing automation; service resolution and knowledge management; business process management; and business intelligence.

The release includes the general availability of Onyx v6.0 and the release of both Knova v7.1 and Million Handshakes v4.5 to the division's customer base.

Onyx v6.0 includes several enhancements, including a SQL generation framework, new calendaring functionality, a robust user interface configuration framework, and a comprehensive group collaboration tool named Assignment Studio. The release also offers improved upgrade ability and referential integrity.

As part of the general availability of Onyx v6.0, Consona CRM is now offering Knova v7.1, a service resolution and knowledge management product, and Million Handshakes v4.5, a marketing automation and customer dialog product from new technology partner Million Handshakes, atop the core Onyx CRM product to both new and existing customers.

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Matrix Solutions, a vendor of sales strategy management software for the media sales industry, has announced that Equity Media Holdings Corporation has chosen Matrix Solutions' MatrixPlus to equip their local broadcast media sales teams with a suite of sales strategy, sales customer relationship management (CRM) and sales operations tools.

Equity Media, which operates 118 stations with multiple affiliations including Univision, Telefutura, My Network TV and FOX, has signed twenty television stations in ten markets with MatrixPlus.

"We needed a centralized management tool as the foundation of our sales growth," said Greg Fess, chief operating officer and senior vice-president of Equity Media.

MatrixPlus is a suite of sales strategy, sales CRM and sales operations tools allowing media salespeople and their managers to store account performance and customer information.

MatrixPlus is expected to let Equity Media's sellers gather and house customer information, organize details of customers advertising strategies and maintain a library of documents used in customer sales activities in one common repository.

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The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," Fairport Convention's "Meet On the Ledge," Jefferson Starship's "Miracles," Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," you know, the songs you just never get tired of.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Vivaldi's The Four Seasons:

Interesting news, that Google and salesforce.com could be joining up here to fight off Microsoft.

The Wall Street Journal, which notes any official confirmation or announcement could be a couple weeks off, said this morning the two firms are "discussing an alliance that could help them compete more effectively with Microsoft."

The companies are "still hashing out details of a potential partnership," but one possible outcome, speculates whoever the insiders were the WSJ talked to, is a "Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com."

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O2, a vendor of mobile services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom, and Vettro have recently announced a partnership to offer mobile enterprise applications for the business segment in Europe.

As part of the agreement, O2 is also deploying Vettro 360 for Sales & CRM to its own field sales organization as part of "a joint effort to embody the best practices of mobile application deployment, training, and usage," according to Vettro officials.

Vettro has been accepted to O2's Preferred Partner Program in the UK. This agreement makes Vettro one of only a handful of application partners to have been accepted to O2's program, and enables its entire Vettro 360 suite of mobile applications to be sold directly by O2 sales personnel.

The Vettro partnership is expected by O2 officials to strengthen O2's portfolio of offerings targeted to a growing population of mobile workers, and is intended to help corporate customers deploy mobile applications for field service, sales, IT service management, and pickup and delivery.

Starting with their Data Mobilization specialists, O2 is extending the Vettro CRM deployment to its entire field-based sales force within the next few weeks.

The Vettro 360 suite of applications integrates with multiple enterprise systems, on-demand services and has mobile capabilities such as GPS, Bluetooth peripherals, RFID, point-of-service transactions, and printing

Joe Rymsza, President and CEO of Vettro, called the deal "another opportunity for Vettro to gain a larger foothold in a lucrative international market."

O2 owns 50 percent of the Tesco Mobile joint venture in the UK, as well as having 100 percent ownership of Be, a leading UK fixed broadband provider.

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Marketbright has announced the availability of eMarketing Enterprise for salesforce.com's AppExchange. The Marketbright product allows companies to implement self-service campaign execution, automate lead qualification and routing, and "gain visibility into closed-loop campaign-to-cash metrics via real-time dashboards," according to company officials.

Basically the product lets users deploy and manage Web sites with full membership and enterprise content management features such as workflow, versioning, and personalization. In addition, it provides a full channel marketing solution for syndicating campaigns to your channel, enabling deal registration and lead distribution, and for managing partner programs and self-service profile publishing.

Erik Bower, president of Marketbright, said the product "complements and extends the capabilities of Salesforce CRM applications by providing a way for marketing people to maximize the number of high quality leads generated while keeping costs under control."

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Austin, Texas-based QuickArrow, Inc., a vendor of professional services automation and management products, has announced the availability of its Spring '07 product release.

This latest version of QuickArrow's Software as a Service application incorporates automatically calculated Earned Value Management metrics to provide clients with "greater visibility into project health from a cost management perspective," company officials say.

"Our clients asked us for the capability to better track project status and to identify and correct any cost performance issues before the project scope is affected," said Louise K. Allen, QuickArrow Vice President of Product Strategy.

This release also includes upgrades to QuickArrow's auditing capabilities, with a Read-Only project view that allows clients to restrict access to the editing of financial data, and the ability to report on all historical Time and Expense activity through a Data Download utility. These features assist QuickArrow's clients with SOX compliance and reporting.

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Autonomy Corporation plc has announced that it has been chosen as a preferred partner for enterprise search and Meaning-based Computing technologies by WM-data, an IT services working the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space.

A division of international IT services company, LogicaCMG, WM-data has approximately 9,000 professionals spanning the Nordic countries.

With this agreement, WM-data will extend its Nordic alliance with Autonomy to offer consulting and systems integration services in the Enterprise Content Management segment.

Autonomy and WM-data have been partners in Sweden for several years and have collaborated in a number of public sector projects. The partnership between the two companies is now being extended across the Nordic region and into all vertical markets.

Jonn Mahlgard, WM-data's ECM partner manager and manager of Emerging Markets, explained that the agreement "enhances WM-data's ECM product for customers in the Nordic region."

WM-data is a part of the LogicaCMG Group, which employs 40,000 people across 41 countries. In the Nordics, the company has about 9,000 employees and operates under the brand WM-data, a LogicaCMG company.

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BPO vendor eTelecare Global Solutions has announced it will invest in its sixth delivery center in the Philippines. The new center, located in the Annex@Shaw facility in Mandaluyon City, Metro Manila, will open in the third quarter of 2007 and employ more than 3,000 employees when fully deployed.

Funding for the new center comes from eTelecare’s recently completed initial public offering of American Depository Shares. eTelecare is the first Philippine-incorporated business process outsourcing company, and the second Filipino company overall, to trade on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

 “We plan to invest a significant portion of the proceeds from our IPO in further expansion in the Philippines,” added Fred Ayala, Chairman of eTelecare.

The Annex@Shaw facility will be situated on a 13,000-square-meter site on Shaw Boulevard. The center will be eTelecare’s 13th overall and sixth in the Philippines, including existing sites in Makati City, Quezon City, Muntinlupa City and two in Cebu City.

The new staff at the center will increase the number of Philippines-based eTelecare employees from 7,300 to more than 10,000. Another 2,600 eTelecare employees are based at the company’s seven U.S. centers, three in Arizona, two in North Dakota, one in South Dakota and one in New Mexico.

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Happy Victoria Day for our Canadian readers, and happy Adelaide Cup Day for our South Australian friends. Evidently that's a holiday.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Stones' Let It Bleed:

Sitting down to work here in Istanbul on a beautiful sunny morning, about ten o'clock, I hear a marching band outside. Of course I go to check it out.

First there's a girl with a large Turkish flag. Next comes a boy with a slightly smaller flag, both stepping drum-major style. Next is a girl holding a large framed portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular Republic of Turkey in 1922.

Then come a few dozen kids in smart band uniforms, marching mostly in step, playing a tuneless song (like most traditional Turkish music) heavy on the drums and cymbals. Behind them come hundreds of other kids and their parents and other assorted adults. All waving little Turkish flags. The symbol of secularism in Turkey.

Cars passing in the single lane open on the street honk their support for the flag, the secular republic for which it stands and the little parade meant to show how strongly Turks value their secular republic. Since the Turkish flag is a white Islamic crescent and star on a field of red, the irony is the anti-Islamist secularists fervently waving an Islamic crescent to show their opposition to an Islamist government.

The problem is that the dominant party in Parliament, the AKP, is mildly Islamist. The AKP party appeals to the rural and conservative vote, not inconsiderable, but also to those who simply want government to run things more or less efficiently and keep the corruption down to tolerable levels.

Which it does. First Coffee lived in Istanbul in the mid-1990s when Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a fire-breathing Islamist radical in his younger days, was mayor here, and he did a good job on the pothole issues, didn't try to ban alcohol and kept his mouth shut about the streets running red with the blood of infidel enemies of Islam.

He was widely seen as the only non-corrupt, reasonably competent national politician, so he was elected with not a few secular votes in the hope that he'd run the nuts and bolts efficiently, and with the knowledge that if he tried to take his Islamism too far, the military would step in, as they've done four times since 1960, to keep things secular by  suggesting that Erdogan either find another line of work of get used to a military prison.

Secular politicians are irrelevant -- hopelessly splintered into multiple parties, hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly inefficient and bogged down in internal squabbling. Nobody counts on them for anything. The real face-off is between the Islamists and their concentrated political strength on the one side, and the secularists with the military on the other.

It's not exactly Jeffersonian democracy when the military has to come in, call time out and start the game over with different rules. But with Iran as their next-door neighbor, Turks don't care. They'll take a military-guaranteed secular republic over a democratic Islamist one. And the schoolchildren parades that go with it are kind of nice, too.

Volker Hildebrand, SAP's VP for CRM, wrote this week that "investments in CRM applications have produced a broad spectrum of results. Some companies experienced dramatic increases in revenue and customer satisfaction along with significant cost savings, while other companies have seen limited returns and disappointing results."

Well, emphasis on the latter, but there have been successes, too, yes. "The benefits would be greater," Hildebrand writes, "if more companies took CRM to the next level by designing their CRM strategy for future aspirations instead of just implementing software to support current capabilities."

Translated into English, this means that companies would get more out of CRM if they used it as a way to get to where they wanted to be, instead of just souping up current practices. In other words, using an analogy we like a lot here in CRMLand, use the tools as a way to  build new highways instead of simply paving the goat paths you've got now.

"Focusing on bottom-line costs and departmental goals limits the top-line potential of CRM investments," Hildebrand writes, identifying one of the biggest frustrations of companies who plunk down a lot of money for CRM tools: "I thought this stuff was gonna save us money -- this quarter."

No, it might not save you money this quarter. Done correctly, it'll save you a whole lot of money in coming quarters. But granted, that's a hard sell to a below-C-level manager who doesn't have ironclad assurances that he'll be around when the stuff pays off. His name's on the investment, he needs his name on a return on that investment ASAP.

This is why one thing we CRMers grow hoarse shouting is "Get C-level support! You must get C-level buy-in!" If CRM's seen as some middle-management or vice president's tech thing it has no chance, it'll wilt the second quarter it doesn't have identifiable ROI. But if it's the pet project of the CEO or CIO, well, that'll give it time to find its legs.

What Hildebrand's saying is sure, you can "do CRM" to show return this quarter -- automate the call center, ramp up the proactive e-mailing, both low-cost efforts that can show "savings" and "return" pretty quickly. But you're splashing around in the shallows with that. There's a lot more to CRM than shaving nickels off your overhead.

Hey, not that we're opposed to shaving nickels. Shave enough of them and you've done your company a great service. But as Hildebrand notes, "driving growth has replaced cutting costs as the most important goal for CEOs. Organizations are beginning to explore a more disciplined approach to exploit untapped opportunities and to make the most of relationships with customers."

So it’s not about how can you save a few dollars on operating expenses here and there. It's about how can you improve your relationships with your customers to turn them into  more profitable customers. Hildebrand throws out a few "business imperatives" to accomplish this, the best one he mentions is "customer centricity."

"It’s the customer’s perception of everything a company does that creates an image of its brand and eventually determines its success or failure as a business," Hildebrand correctly notes. Everything -- if your money-saving automated phone system is irritating customers to the point where they're frustrated that doesn't bode well for your future, and it isn't practicing correct CRM, although you might be saving money.

Practicing correct CRM is responding quickly to changing customer needs, Hildebrand says, when a company strives "to become fully customer-centric, deliver superior customer value and consistently provide an exceptional customer experience across all customer touch points."

That's not something that happens next quarter. That's not something that sweetens the bottom line this year. But if you'd like to be in business a year or two from now, or longer, that's what you'll do.

When you're not, it shows. "I wish someone would introduce the Customer-Centric Worldview to Symantec, publishers of Norton Anti-Virus," a frustrated ex-customer of Symantec wrote recently on GoodExperience.com. She tried calling customer service, "no phone number - anywhere." She's left with "the only option of filling in an e-mail form, to which I receive an automated response informing me that someone would get back with me within 4 -- yes, 4 -- business days."

The following Tuesday she received an e-mail telling her to call Customer Service, and giving me an 800 number. "ARGGGHHH! Couldn't they have just posted the number on their website?!?!" Things were dragged out another five days before being resolved.

The system, as the woman astutely deduced, "was built on the company's view and completely ignored the customer view. If Symantec had a Customer-Centric Worldview, they would have set up something similar to McAfee, whose firewall software I use. At the McAfee site, I was able to quickly log in, retrieve the needed software key and reinstall the firewall on my new computer. Total operation - less than 15 minutes."

Symantec may have a better product than McAfee, but who cares? First Coffee used to buy Symantec protection, but now uses McAfee for exactly the reasons outlined above. Symantec's not so much better they can get away with flipping the customer the bird.