Pivotal CRM in India, A Christmas Carol, Salentica and Microsoft CRM, Urban Outfitters Picks Callfinity, DirecTV Mobile CRM, eLoyalty, Siperian

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David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

Pivotal CRM in India, A Christmas Carol, Salentica and Microsoft CRM, Urban Outfitters Picks Callfinity, DirecTV Mobile CRM, eLoyalty, Siperian

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

CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of China's CDC Corporation, has launched its Pivotal Customer Relationship Management (CRM in the Indian market through its new franchise partner, CDC CRM Solutions Private.

CDC Software has said it will pay $20 million for investment in channel partners worldwide. CDC Software has taken a 19 percent ownership stake in CDC CRM Solutions Private Ltd. and the company will exclusively sell Pivotal CRM in India.

CDC CRM Solutions has announced a sale of Pivotal CRM to TTK Services, a person-to-person outsourcing company in India.



According to The Writer's Almanac, today in 1843 Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. The book, an instant bestseller, revived the entire tradition of Christmas, which was then on the decline in England. "It launched Dickens into a fame much like The Beatles," the Almanac says, "on his reading tours, Charles Dickens was mobbed by adoring fans, who would rip his clothes, wait in long lines to shake his hand, and pull down the windows on his train car to grab at him."



Salentica Systems has announced it will begin offering compatible products within 30 days of the next major release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "Titan," an evolution of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 product, introduces an advanced multi-tenant architecture, and uses a single code base to support on-premise deployments as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments.

Expected to be generally available in early 2008, the Titan CRM will offer a smooth upgrade path for existing on-premise and SaaS customers.

Salentica has been working with Microsoft for the past year under its Technology Adoption Program, and was one of a group of global partners chosen to be involved from the very early stages of the product development cycle.

"Our early involvement and ongoing investment in product development has allowed us to be very fast off the mark in offering our clients all the benefits of Microsoft's latest CRM release," said Bill Rourke, President, Salentica. "Our products will be available, on both an on-premise and hosted basis, for Titan's release."

Salentica's products are meant to help wealth management firms, institutional brokers and financial product wholesalers drive revenue and manage their client relationships. All data is instantly captured and retrievable for client service, management reporting and regulatory compliance.

Rourke recommends that companies, wishing to upgrade, set up as a defined project with a budget and timeline. "A good step to take even now is to start building a list of preferred enhancements and changes," he advised. "This list can be prioritized and the requirements matched to the capabilities of the upcoming release."



Callfinity, a vendor of contact center technology, and Urban Outfitters, which operates under the Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People brands, have announced that the retailer has selected Callfinity's call recording, reporting, and quality evaluation systems for use within its contact centers.

Bryan Whitney, Director of Call Center Operations for Urban Outfitters, said they have implemented Callfinity's Quality Monitoring application "because it increases our ability to evaluate and improve our customer service interactions within the Direct Contact Center. It is augmented by Callfinity's Business Intelligence product, which assists us in identifying the root causes that prompt customer inquiries."

Callfinity's full suite of products includes a multimodal ACD platform for queuing and routing inbound telephone calls, chat sessions, e-mails, and faxes to call center agents; a modular IVR system for automated assistance and Web services support; a voice and screen recording system for quality management and training as well as a complete CRM system designed for use in contact centers. The Callfinity modular suite is available as both an on-premise system and as a hosted service.



Antenna Software has announced that its customer, DirecTV, received Network World's Enterprise All-Star Award for its mobile CRM project. DirecTV used Antenna's AMPower SALES product to provide its 75 area sales managers with real-time customer and product information in the field -- "allowing them to access essential data and manage accounts using their BlackBerry smartphones," according to the Antennians.

DirecTV wanted to provide its mobile salesforce with consistent, up-to-the minute marketing and sales information without consuming IT resources. DirecTV picked Antenna's AMPower SALES mobile application, an on-demand product that manages and guarantees delivery of bidirectional wireless communications and transactions between the device and the back-end system.

Since deploying AMPower SALES, DirecTV officials say they've seen a 30 percent increase in the number of accounts that can be visited in a week, improved frequency of sales data reporting from seven days to one day and service request resolution shortened from five days to three days.

"DirecTV's successful implementation of Antenna's AMPower SALES caught the judges' attention for its smart decision to mobilize its CRM on-demand applications," said Beth Schultz, editor, Network World.

"This mobile CRM implementation will serve as a model for other enterprises moving forward," said Jim Somers, vice president of marketing, Antenna Software. "We are delighted that DirecTV has been singled out for demonstrating that mobility not only adds value to an enterprise CRM system, but provides real and measurable business benefits on top of that."



Siperian, developers of a master data management platform, have announced that Siperian MDM Hub is now available on salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace.

The integration of Siperian MDM Hub with salesforce.com's Force.com platform and CRM applications is intended to help organizations obtain customer data for "improved sales productivity and more effective customer service," according to the Siperianites.

Siperian MDM Hub unifies data about customers, products, and organizations across different systems and delivers views of this data to reduce cost, improve compliance, and drive operational effectiveness.

Now AppExchange-certified, the Siperian MDM Hub demonstrates how customer information contained in Force.com or Salesforce CRM applications can be aggregated, reconciled and synchronized across the enterprise. Siperian MDM Hub combines the most up-to-date customer information from disparate sources and makes it available in real-time even as updates are being made in Salesforce and other applications.



ELoyalty, an enterprise CRM vendor, has provided an update on the progress of its Behavioral Analytics Service Line. Since its last update on November 7, eLoyalty has signed two additional Behavioral Analytics Deployment contracts and one additional Behavioral Analytics Assessment contract, the eLoyaltians say.

The two most recent deployment contracts are with "a very large retail bank" and with "one of the 5 largest HMOs," with both contracts having a combined value of approximately $10 million.

ELoyalty has signed, in the fourth quarter, five contracts for Assessments and three for deployments. The company currently has 29 Behavioral Analytics customers, 15 customers in deployment and 14 customers in assessment.

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