January 31, 2006

C3i Announces Pharmaceutical CRM Buy

By DAVID SIMS

TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

C3i, a CRM vendor, today announced that a specialty pharmaceutical company selected C3i to offer end-to-end Siebel Pharma Services.

C3i will upgrade the life sciences customer's CRM application to Siebel 7.8 for its 750 U.S.-based sales force. Following the upgrade, C3i officials say, they'll provide global help desk support, and managed services for Tier II and Tier III technical support.

C3i will also offer workstation engineering, tablet deployment and hardware repair services for new tablet computers. The whole deal includes roll-out training and new hire instruction to ensure end-user adoption of the Siebel Pharma system.

Earlier this month C3i launched a online service to prevent, detect and repair computer problems, allowing C3i help desk agents to solve software issues for mobile end users.

The service will diagnose and fix some software issues and "significantly reduce unnecessary laptop shipments, leading to less sales force downtime and IT support costs," according to C3i officials at the time of the announcement.

"Since the majority of all hardware repair shipments are actually caused by software-related problems," said Bob Piwko, chief operating officer of C3i, "we saw an opportunity to dramatically decrease the number of times a sales force ships in their computer for service."

Richard Matlus, research vice president at Gartner said pharmaceutical companies rely on CRM more than some other firms do. "These organizations require a support infrastructure that has world-class CRM implementation and support experience that allows them to rapidly use and adopt CRM systems to be productive in the field."

Dave Hanaman, chief sales and marketing officer at C3i said currently over 34,000 pharmaceutical reps use C3i's support.

C3i offers global and seamlessly integrated operations support from the United States, India and Bulgaria.

Last fall C3i announced that ImClone Systems, Inc., a provider of cancer treatment therapies, selected C3i to deploy and provide end-to-end CRM for its entire mobile sales team.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.