On-premise and on-demand CRM in action

Eastman Chemical, a major producer of chemicals, fibres and plastics has deployed SAP CRM to capture a more robust view of these customer interactions and provide improved support for sales.

The company had purchased CRM seats as part of a bundled, discount package when it upgraded to ECC 5.0, SAP's ERP application several years ago, but had left the CRM seats unused. It made the decision to move to the CRM option following the release of CRM 2007 with its improved user interface.

“Our emphasis is on service and insight into customer relationships,” said Bob Strickler, technical lead for the Interaction Center project from Eastman Chemical. “The interaction centre functionality of SAP CRM will quickly and easily enable us to capture interactions and create the 360-degree view of the customer for all account team members.

"Thanks to the flexibility and scalability of SAP CRM, we plan to complete the deployment to all our CSRs in North America by the end of this year, and finish the global deployment by mid-2009. We could not have embarked on such an ambitious undertaking without the capabilities provided by SAP CRM.”

Dell has signed a three-year agreement through 2011 to use Salesforce.com's Force.com platform to build and deploy unlimited applications to their entire global workforce. This was the single largest transaction in Salesforce.com's history and also also the first flat-fee enterprise license agreement the company has signed.

Dell will use Salesforce services for salesforce automation, partner relationship management, innovation management through its Dell IdeaStorm.com website, customer support, and full enterprise wide application and deployment using force.com platform as a service.

“On any given day we touch 3 million customers, whether it’s online or through direct interaction,” says Kevin Kettler, CTO at Dell. “We had a lot of great ideas coming in to the company, but we needed some form of idea management.

"[Dell founder] Michael Dell met with [Salesforce.com CEO] Marc Benioff and came up with the IdeaStorm website so that we could manage all those ideas. The benefit of the system is that we had all this information to hand, but it would have taken us so much longer to collate and analyse it. By using IdeaStorm we are able to take a customer request and transform it into a product very quickly.”

Other articles in this focus report: