Siebel Systems, Inc. with its partner IBM, today announced Siebel CRM OnDemand—Industry Editions, the first hosted CRM solutions with embedded industry-specific capabilities.
Siebel CRM OnDemand—Industry Editions will provide out-of-the-box capabilities that meet the specialized needs of eight different industries, enabling organizations to address the sales, service, and marketing challenges unique to their industry.
Siebel CRM OnDemand industry-specific editions for the insurance, high technology, automotive, and communications and media industries will be available this summer. Additional editions for the financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and consumer goods industries will be available this winter.
“This announcement leverages Siebel Systems’ deep industry expertise and is a natural extension of the company’s on demand strategy. Siebel Systems will deliver solutions that address all levels of industry-specific requirements, from basic user interface changes such as the creation of simple templates through custom fields and tabs, to more robust and sophisticated data-level enhancements such as support for industry-specific data and objects models, and ultimately to the ability to manage complete business processes leveraging analytics,” said Sheryl Kingstone, CRM Analyst, Yankee Group.
“The challenges that organizations face when engaging with their customers differ substantially across industries,” said Mike Betzer, Vice President and General Manager, OnDemand Products, Siebel Systems. “With this announcement, organizations of all sizes can now rapidly solve industry-specific business problems in a cost-effective manner.”
New Solutions Leverage Siebel Systems’ Deep Industry Domain Expertise
Since first introducing industry-specific applications in 1998, Siebel Systems has built CRM solutions ranging across 23 industry segments. “We are able to offer substantial depth in our hosted industry-specific offerings because they were developed using the same data model and business logic as Siebel Systems’ on premise solutions,” said Kevin Nix, Group Vice President, Industry Applications. “More than 80 percent of the 2.36 million Siebel users now in production are using an industry-specific Siebel application. As the leader in industry-focused CRM, we are uniquely positioned to now introduce these capabilities to the hosted market.”
Broad Industry Functionality, Delivered On Demand
With Siebel CRM OnDemand—Industry Editions, customers can choose to deploy these hosted solutions as stand-alone systems or integrated with one of Siebel Systems’ 23 industry-specific on premise solutions. Only Siebel Systems offers this unique hybrid CRM capability. For example, channel partners, extended sales organizations, field offices, or foreign subsidiaries using Siebel CRM OnDemand-Industry Editions can seamlessly share information with an on premise Siebel CRM deployment to support networkwide, industry-specific business processes such as policy quoting and renewal management in the insurance industry or customer and vehicle service in the automotive industry.
With Siebel CRM OnDemand—Insurance Edition, an insurance company can now allow its extended ecosystem of captive and independent brokers to access a common CRM system in order to build systemwide sales and service efficiencies and better serve its customers. For the first time, captive agents responsible for selling, as well as claims servicing and support, will be able to use Siebel CRM OnDemand to assign leads to the extended sales organization and integrate local CRM deployments with central claims processing and policy management systems. Independent agents will also benefit from their ability to better collaborate with multiple providers in acquiring and retaining customers.
“Siebel Systems’ domain expertise in insurance, together with the fast deployment and ease of use of a hosted CRM solution, offers a winning combination for our industry,” said Dominique Mailloux, VP Total Benefits, Sun Life Financial. “Having insurance-specific features such as policy and product views integrated into Siebel CRM OnDemand will enable a better understanding of customers and prospects.”
Similarly, automobile manufacturers standardized on Siebel Automotive can now deploy Siebel CRM OnDemand—Automotive Edition globally to emerging markets for support of customer service functions, allowing them to better track and communicate data around a customer’s vehicle ownership experience. In addition, manufacturers may deploy the hosted offering to independent dealers, allowing them to share marketing campaign data, sales leads, and relevant customer information with those individuals at the dealership who maintain the day-to-day customer relationship. As a result, both the manufacturer and the dealership gain access to the same customer data that constitutes the broader customer relationship.
“This is a logical extension of Siebel Automotive functionality. It has the potential to give dealers an affordable but powerful CRM solution, with the added benefit of integrating manufacturers’ data with the data from the dealer’s own Dealer Management System,” said Patrik Riese, Director of CRM, Saab Cars USA, Inc.
Availability, Pricing, and Promotion
Siebel CRM OnDemand-Industry Editions will be available this summer for the automotive, communications, insurance, and high technology industry segments, followed by financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and consumer goods sectors later in the year. The industry-specific solutions will be offered at $100 per user per month. Customers signing a one-year service agreement can secure an introductory price of $70 per user per month. For more information, please visit www.crmondemand.com.
