Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8 Delivers Advanced Features Supporting Team Collaboration and Marketing Segmentation

“Release 8 delivers to our users increased collaboration, productivity, and effectiveness among workgroups, while enabling management to gain deeper insight into their sales, marketing, and service initiatives,” said Bruce Cleveland, Senior Vice President and General Manager, OnDemand and SMB, Siebel Systems. “This release, our fifth in the past 12 months, demonstrates the leading innovation and rapid development cycles that are synonymous with our hosted offering. This unique approach, combined with our industry expertise in customer-facing solutions, is a key reason why Siebel CRM OnDemand receives top marks from leading industry analysts and has become the leading hosted solution for organizations of all sizes seeking strategic CRM capabilities to improve their business.”

“Siebel CRM OnDemand is evolving at a rapid pace,” said Mary Wardley, Vice President of CRM Software Research at IDC. “The new features included in Release 8 underscore Siebel’s commitment to the hosted software market.”

Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8 expands on the powerful capabilities of Siebel Systems’ hosted solution, including the industry’s only hosted data warehouse; advanced analytics capabilities; industry-specific editions; and a prebuilt, integrated hosted contact center. New features include:

• Group calendaring and delegated task management—View consolidated team calendars and task lists to coordinate schedules, balance workloads, and align resources with built-in Microsoft Outlook integration
• Advanced collaboration and group sharing—Easily customize groups to share accounts, contacts, and opportunities among team members and share consolidated team calendars for maximized productivity and insight
• Contact networking—Track business and social relationships between contacts to uncover new revenue opportunities and build new relationships
• Advanced marketing segmentation wizard—Perform multidimensional segmentations to target the right marketing message to the right contact for improved ROI of marketing campaigns 

Maximize Group Productivity and Effectiveness
Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8 provides greater personal and team productivity with visibility across accounts, opportunities, and contacts through its new collaborative sharing capabilities. Users can now analyze group calendars in a single consolidated view for better workload management and track assigned tasks through completion for maximum customer satisfaction. Because it provides built-in integration to familiar applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Siebel CRM OnDemand enables rapid user adoption.

“The shared calendar function in Release 8 helps our team stay coordinated. We can now view each other’s calendars for scheduling joint appointments and emailing meeting notifications,” said Tobin J. Behling, Marketing Manager, Sigma Breakthrough Technologies, Inc. “Group sharing facilitates collaboration and allows us to take a team selling approach to our accounts, since we can share contacts and opportunities. And the delegated task management capability helps us track tasks across the teams, making sure that no customer need goes unfulfilled.”

Deep Customer Insight and Return on Investment
For marketing program development and planning, the new Marketing Segmentation Wizard helps uncover additional revenue-generating opportunities within contact networks. By segmenting contacts using multidimensional criteria, users can customize campaign messages for effective target marketing. As campaigns are deployed into the field, marketing program managers can use insight-driven analytics and business intelligence tools to monitor and react to the sales performance on opportunities generated, ultimately improving program ROI and delivering immediate business impact.

“The Segmentation Wizard in Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8 is right up our alley,” said Larry Dinkler, Director of Customer Reporting, Integrated DisAbility Resources (IDR), a group disability risk and claim management service organization. “It is very easy to use and allows us to target and focus our direct marketing and email campaigns for optimal sales impact.”

Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8 is available now. For additional information, please visit www.crmondemand.com.

About Siebel Systems
Siebel Systems is the world’s leading provider of customer-facing solutions that deliver demonstrable business results and long-term competitive advantage. Siebel’s multichannel offerings allow organizations to intelligently manage and coordinate all customer interactions across the Web, contact center, field sales/service force, branch/retail network, and indirect and partner distribution channels. Siebel solutions draw upon the company’s best-in-class capabilities in customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence, and customer data integration and can be deployed as licensed software or as a hosted service. Siebel solutions are tailored to the unique needs of 23 industries and incorporate industry-specific business processes, best practices, and business insight. They are the product of more than $2 billion in R&D investments and reflect over 11 years of experience with more than 4,000 organizations. Together with its extensive global network of alliance partners, Siebel provides the people, process, and technology expertise critical in driving business value from the deployment of customer-facing solutions. Over 3 million users worldwide in organizations of all sizes depend on Siebel solutions to deliver dramatic improvements in how they identify, acquire, retain, and serve customers. For more information, visit www.siebel.com.