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390 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age

INTERACTIVE SESSION: TECHNOLOGY

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT HEADS TO THE CLOUD

Salesforce.com is the most successful enterprise- reports and dashboards monitoring key perfor-
scale software as a service (SaaS) and the undis- mance indicators, sales calls, and sales volume. The
puted global leader in cloud-based customer rela- Wall Street Journal, Pitney Bowes, Kimberly-Clark,
tionship management (CRM) systems. Users can and Starbucks are among Salesforce’s other large
access Salesforce applications anywhere through an corporate CRM users.
Internet-enabled mobile device or a connected com- Not to be outdone, established on-premise enter-
puter. Subscriptions start as low as $15 per user per prise software companies such as Oracle have
month for the pared-down Group version for small moved into cloud software services. Pricing starts at
sales and marketing teams, with monthly subscrip- $70 per month per user. Oracle’s CRM on Demand
tions for large enterprises ranging from $65–$250 per system has many capabilities, including embedded
user. tools for forecasting and analytics and interactive
Salesforce has over 100,000 customers. Small dashboards. Subscribers are able to use these tools
businesses find the on-demand model especially to answer questions such as “How efficient is your
appealing because there are no large up-front sales effort?” or “How much are your customers
hardware and software investments or lengthy imple- spending?”
mentations on corporate computer systems. Fireclay GRT Hotels & Resorts, a leading hotel group in
Tile, a 37-employee environmentally friendly sus- South India with 10 hotels, used Oracle CRM on
tainable tile manufacturer, adopted Salesforce and Demand to create a centralized CRM system for all
realized multiple benefits. Salesforce’s e-mail and of its properties. The system makes it possible for
Web-to-lead capabilities helped the company quadru- all the hotels in the group to share customer data,
ple new sales leads. (Web-to-lead automatically adds such as room and rate preferences, and to create
leads collected from the Web to the company’s mas- unified marketing programs that eliminate unnec-
ter database). A task feature automatically generates essary price competition between the company’s
specific tasks based on the type of lead ( architect, hotels. GRT believes that by making customer
contractor, dealer, or homeowner) and the stage in behavior data available for forecasting sales and by
the sales process. The system automates customer creating more targeted marketing campaigns, the
service functions including order confirmations, fol- CRM system has increased productivity about 25
low-up customer satisfaction surveys, and shipping percent. Managers are able to monitor the number
notifications of customer calls that employees answer each
Salesforce's social tools enable Fireclay to compete month regarding bookings and general hotel infor-
successfully against large flooring manufacturers and mation to identify underperformers. GRT manage-
other custom tile producers by providing superior ment believes that using a hosted CRM service with
customer service. The company uses Salesforce.com a monthly fee costs 65 percent less than if it had
to maintain customer profiles, so its sales, service, purchased and maintained its own CRM software.
and production teams have complete customer Moreover, Oracle’s centralized, secure Web-based
views as soon as leads come in from the Web. CRM application ensures that confidential data, such
Fireclay’s internal social network based on Salesforce as promotion plans, cannot be removed by GRT
Chatter helps employees track orders and work employees when they leave the organization.
closely together to meet customer needs. Customer While traditional enterprise software vendors
satisfaction has increased 90 percent. like Oracle are using their market-leading position
But Salesforce.com also appeals to large to penetrate the cloud-based application market,
companies. Dr. Pepper Snapple Group adopted newcomers such as SugarCRM have found suc-
Salesforce CRM to replace an outmoded Excel appli- cess, even among larger companies. Thomas Cook
cation that required extensive manual data input to France, a subsidiary of the worldwide Thomas Cook
compile reports on more than 50 beverage brands Group Travel plc, is an example. Thomas Cook
and to track sales performance against objectives France has 1,700 employees and is the second largest
in real time. The system now tracks field activities travel company in France, providing leisure travel
for more than 10,000 accounts, with automated programs for groups of 15 travelers. The company

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