Smarter Utility

 

[September 01, 2005]

CRM Companies Take Glee In Scoring Former Salesforce and Siebel Customers

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
 
I've seen not one, but two, somewhat smug press releases today. How can a press release be smug? When it's reporting a score off one of the biggest kids on the block: you know – the kid with the best bike, a tree house and a Mom that bakes cookies every day. I like to think of this as "nyah nyah" marketing.

 
The big kids are Salesforce.com and Siebel. (I'm only speculating that these companies have tree houses, by the way.) The two smaller kids are Entellium CRM and NetSuite.
 
Entellium Corp. announced today that Prepared Response, Inc., which is a developer of emergency response solutions for public and private sectors, picked Entellium over Salesforce.com after an extensive side-by-side so-called "bake-off" (their words, not mine) between the two applications. Prepared Response will deploy Entellium eSalesForce for sales and marketing, in addition to Entellium eCustomerCenter for customer support.
 
"User adoption was a key decision factor for us," said Jim Finnell, CEO of Prepared Response. "Salesforce.com required much more from our users to accomplish everyday activity -- the learning curve was steeper because there were more screens and tabs to have to learn. The team finds Entellium far more intuitive, so it's easier for them to put data into the system, which makes a huge difference to the accuracy of our reports."
 
In other news, on-demand CRM provider NetSuite announced that, Palo Alto, California-based Financial Engines has implemented NetSuite CRM+ for its marketing, sales and client management operations. Previously a Siebel customer, Financial Engines chose NetSuite for its "stronger, distributed client support module, its customizable dashboards, and its ability to be tailored to run in tandem with the firm's ERP software of record, Oracle Financials."
 
“One of our key drivers for a CRM system was distributed customer information,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Financial Engines. “NetSuite is providing us a customer hub where all critical client information can be stored and accessed -- by everyone who needs it, when they need it. Also NetSuite was able to uniquely model our business and deliver relevant information through easy-to-use dashboards. We anticipate that this will have a large impact on efficiency and client satisfaction. Indeed, as NetSuite says, they are putting the 'C' back into CRM.”
 
"So there!" seems to be the message to Salesforce.com and Siebel today.
 
For more information about the two adoptions, visit www.entellium.com and www.netsuite.com.
 
Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles by Tracey Schelmetic, please visit:
 

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