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Siebel CRM OnDemand Delivers Industry's First Prebuilt Hosted Contact Center SolutionSAN MATEO, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- March 29, 2005 -- Organizations of All Sizes Can Seamlessly Manage Customer Communications across Voice, Email, and Web Channels with Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7 Siebel Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SEBL), a leading provider of business applications software, today announced the availability of Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7. This release extends the capabilities of Siebel CRM OnDemand by providing the first and only hosted contact center solution available as a prebuilt option within hosted CRM, enabling both enterprises and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to easily manage multichannel customer communications. Industry analysts estimate that more than 70 percent of all customer interactions occur through "live" phone conversations or interactive voice response (IVR) interactions alone. With the Siebel Contact OnDemand module, organizations can now deploy a world-class contact center to manage these critical customer interactions across sales, marketing, and service without having to build a traditional contact center infrastructure, which requires costly investments in hardware, software, and customization. "Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7 is the industry's first solution to deliver to both enterprises and SMBs a fast-to-deploy, easy-to-use, and highly robust hosted contact center that doesn't require additional infrastructural investments," said Bruce Cleveland, Senior Vice President and General Manager, OnDemand and SMB at Siebel Systems. "With this release, Siebel Systems continues to expose the powerful capabilities embedded in our world-class technology platform while also further distancing ourselves from tactical, generic, hosted SFA offerings that force customers to undertake time-consuming and expensive customization to address basic requirements that we support out of the box." "The introduction of Siebel Contact OnDemand within Ingersoll-Rand allows us to standardize business processes across multiple customer service centers. The results have been reductions of cost and implementation complexity," said Rob Martens, Director of Global Front Office Technology at Ingersoll-Rand, a leading innovation and solutions provider for the major global markets of climate control, industrial solutions, infrastructure, and security and safety. "The ability to deploy and manage a completely hosted CRM solution with built-in contact center functionality means that our businesses can focus more time on servicing our accounts and less time worrying about integration and development. Siebel's proven track record with existing on premise deployments at Ingersoll-Rand, combined with the deployment options Siebel CRM OnDemand offers, made our selection process a simple one." The Only Third-Generation Hosted Contact Center Solution That Delivers Maximum ROI The Siebel Contact OnDemand solution represents the only third-generation hosted contact center solution available today. First-generation solutions from other generic hosted CRM vendors only provide very limited software development kits (SDKs) and basic application programming interfaces (APIs) for building expensive custom integrations to third-party solutions and traditional contact center infrastructures. Second-generation solutions, which Siebel Systems has uniquely provided since January 2004, deliver preintegrated contact center capabilities requiring no customization or investment in infrastructure. With Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7, Siebel Systems has further raised the bar by delivering a hosted contact center solution as a prebuilt extension to its hosted CRM offering, thus enabling more advanced workflows, more complete visibility across functions, and better business insight into customer communications. As a result, organizations will be able to maximize their ROI by providing the highest levels of service to their customers and deliver a more consistent customer experience to drive cross-selling and up-selling. The result of more than ten thousand hours of research and development, Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7 provides the following key benefits: Complete customer communications management -- Uniquely streamlines agent productivity with a unified communications desktop that provides a 360-degree view of customer interactions across voice, email, and Web channels -- Drives consistent customer communications across sales, marketing, and service -- Captures real-time activities and interactions from multiple channels in a single database -- Provides deep customer insight with comprehensive analytics across contact center and CRM interactions Fast, flexible, and affordable built-in hosted contact center -- Enables computer telephony integration (CTI), IVR, automatic call distribution (ACD), and PBX capabilities built-in to hosted CRM solution, eliminating need to purchase, integrate, or maintain hardware or software -- Enables flexibility of agents regardless of location, including work-at-home employees -- Delivers easily scalable capacity to meet business demand due to promotions, seasonality, or recalls -- Eliminates need for expensive customization to provide lowest total cost of ownership in a single vendor solution Highly personalized customer interactions -- Improves customer satisfaction by routing communications based on customer need with a rules-driven engine -- Increases ability to deliver first-call resolution by routing communications based on agent skill and availability -- Delivers personalized customer experience with CTI that instantly provides agents with customer identification and customer's profile and purchasing history "Our business livelihood relies on receiving product orders over the telephone 24 hours per day," said John Congdon, Vice President of Sales at Product Partners, a provider of home fitness and weight-loss solutions branded under the Beachbody name. "During advertising promotions and holidays, we count on Siebel Contact OnDemand to handle increased and wildly fluctuating call volumes without worrying about additional infrastructure. Because the product is completely hosted, we can extend Siebel Contact OnDemand to our work-at-home agent community without compromising service levels, call quality, or agent visibility." Availability and Pricing With Release 7, Siebel Contact OnDemand is immediately available in North America. Pricing for Siebel CRM OnDemand bundled with Siebel Contact OnDemand starts at $150 per user per month, with additional telephony charges based upon usage. Additional bundles with Siebel CRM OnDemand's Industry Editions are also available, and Siebel Contact OnDemand is also available as a stand-alone offering that can be easily integrated with any on premise or hosted CRM solution for $100 per user per month, with additional telephony charges based upon usage. For more information, visit www.crmondemand.com. About Siebel Systems Siebel Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of business applications software, enabling corporations to sell to, market to, and serve customers across multiple channels and lines of business. With more than 4,000 customer deployments worldwide, Siebel Systems provides organizations with a proven set of industry-specific best practices, CRM applications, market-leading analytics products, and business processes, empowering them to consistently deliver superior customer experiences and establish more profitable customer relationships. Siebel Systems' sales and service facilities are located in more than 30 countries. For more information on Siebel Systems solutions and services, please visit our Web site: CRM - http://www.siebel.com/crm; OnDemand Solutions - http://www.crmondemand.com; Industry CRM - http://www.siebel.com/industry-crm; Call Center and Service - http://www.siebel.com/call-center; Sales Force Automation - http://www.siebel.com/sales-force-automation; Marketing Automation - http://www.siebel.com/marketing-automation; Business Intelligence - http://www.siebel.com/business-intelligence; Integration Solutions - http://www.siebel.com/integration-solutions; CRM Services - http://www.siebel.com/crm-services Except for the historical information contained herein, this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risk or uncertainties. Future operating results of Siebel Systems may differ from the results discussed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements due to factors that include, but are not limited to, risks associated with customer relations, such as the availability of Siebel Systems' products and services, customer implementation of products and services, relationships with customers, third-party vendors and systems integrators, concentration of revenues in a relatively small number of customers, existence of errors or defects in products, ability to successfully manage growth, significant current and expected additional competition and the need to continue to expand product distribution and services offerings. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of Siebel Systems are included in Siebel Systems' Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available at www.sec.gov. Siebel Systems assumes no obligation to update the information in this press release. Siebel is a trademark of Siebel Systems, Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only. |
