As Siebel Systems Inc.s worldwide user week conference gets under way in Chicago next week, the issue of how much return on investment CRM applications deliver is sure to be raised, especially since Siebel products tend to be more expensive than other customer relationship management applications.
Enter Quixi Inc., previously known for CRM add-ons that incorporate speech recognition, and its new Quixi Sales Metrics Tool, which tracks how employees on a CRM project are using the system.
The tool, which Quixi will announce at the show, focuses specifically on the SFA (sales force automation) side of CRM, providing such information as the number of new accounts, opportunities, activities and contacts created or updated in a given time period (cumulative and by end user). It also reports on the completeness of data, the frequency of updates to opportunities over a given time period, and sales representative activity on opportunities and accounts.
The tool is available now only for Siebels SFA applications but will eventually be made available for other vendors SFA applications, according to officials at Quixi, in New York.
Also at Siebel Worldwide User Week, DataDistilleries, of Amsterdam, will launch New York-based U.S. operations for its analytical CRM solutions. DataDistilleries, a Siebel alliance partner, positions its two key products, Customer Behavioral Modeling and Real Time Recommendations, behind a variety of CRM front ends, such as call center, SFA or Web content management channels, and allows sales personnel to make targeted offers in real time.
The company also includes its Marketing Automation module, which, when combined with its other back-end products, allowed customers such as Dutch bank Postbank NV to cut its direct mail pieces by half with a 20 percent increase in accepted offers, according to DataDistilleries.
Next month, DataDistilleries will launch Version 3 of its products, with additional multichannel capabilities, multiple views of data, new Java 2 Enterprise Edition support and more connectors to back-end applications.
