SAN MATEO, CA.—September 10, 2002—NetLedger, Inc., makers of the Oracle® Small Business Suite (Nasdaq: ORCL), today announced NetCRM™, a powerful online customer relationship management (CRM) solution designed to automate all "front-office" customer interaction - from marketing to sales to support to account management. In addition to offering broad functionality for sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer support, NetCRM adds important new features not found in any other online CRM solution available on the market:
The new application service builds on the CRM functionality found in the company's flagship Oracle Small Business Suite, an application service that integrates complete front-office and back-office application functionality to enable companies to run their entire enterprise on a single, hosted software service. With more than 5,200 companies currently licensing the Oracle Small Business Suite, NetLedger is the leading provider of integrated ERP/CRM application services to small to mid-size enterprises.
"It's amazing that the one thing that all other online sales automation systems can't do is make a sale - you literally cannot take the order," said Zach Nelson, president and COO of NetLedger. "NetCRM's order management functionality, combined with its integrated marketing, sales and support technology, gives small and mid-size businesses a complete CRM solution in an affordable, easy-to-use package. And, with the click of their mouse, customers can upgrade to the holy grail of business applications - an integrated suite that combines front-office CRM with back-office accounting."
"In our search for a solution that could automate our process from presale to post-sale support and everything in between, NetLedger's offering was the best match for our needs and provided us with the cost-benefit ratio we were looking for," said Bob Lem, CIO of LoJack, the recognised world-leader in stolen vehicle recovery technology.
"NetCRM has numerous features for solution providers that competing CRM solutions have yet to master," said Brenda Brinkley of Need IT Now, a NetLedger Solution Provider in Houston, Texas. "We partner with many companies from the Florida Panhandle to Texas. Full functionality and ease of use in our customer and partner management system is paramount for us. NetCRM's Partner Center allows me immediate access to the leads we generate and to our partner profiles. I can place orders, view the status of existing orders, and do much more. And if I need self-service capabilities, I turn to NetCRM's NetAnswers. This knowledge base solution is perfect for resellers like me who need to do their work quickly and effectively, anytime, anywhere."
NetCRM provides small to mid-size enterprises with complete customer life-cycle management and the flexibility to tailor these capabilities to the way they do business:
Automated Lead Processing Strengthens Pipeline - Capturing leads via an online form allows for a personalised email auto reply with NetCRM. Whether leads are added via an online form, imported from a list or entered manually, territory assignment rules will allow a lead to be routed to the correct person for follow-up within the sales pipeline. Territory assignment rules are completely customizable and can be based on any information contained within the lead record. NetCRM delivers users the flexibility to pre-qualify leads, assign leads to a direct sales force, or send them out to reseller partners.
Quotes and Order Management Makes Selling Easier and Feeds Accurate Forecasting - Sales representatives have complete flexibility to select from the product or service catalogs while creating sales quotes or orders within NetCRM. Sales managers are provided with notifications within their sales dashboard when sales orders require approval before moving to the final closing stage. These sales transactions help provide sales managers and executives with a complete and accurate view of the forecast for the current period and quarters to come.
Marketing, Sales and Support Dashboards Highlight Key Information - NetCRM Dashboards are customised to the role of the individual user within the organisation. Graphical snapshots provide sales representatives and managers with quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year performance comparisons while saved searches highlight the latest results of campaigns for marketing managers. Support representatives and managers will find shortcuts and the quick search invaluable in finding customer information at a moment's notice. And the reminders within a Dashboard make it impossible to miss the things that have to get done and the problems that must be solved.
Promotion Management Produces More Business and Improves Customer Response - NetCRM gives users the ability to run promotions to generate general interest and drive sales of their products and services. Promotions can be applied for limited-time pricing discounts, special partner referral agreements, or simply to associate a particular marketing campaign. Complete statistics of responses to these promotions are tracked at both the campaign level and the sales transaction level, allowing for comprehensive customer profiling of both response and buying patterns.
Marketing Campaigns Deliver Tailored Messaging - With great customer intelligence within NetCRM, businesses can deliver the right message in marketing campaigns much more effectively. NetCRM provides users the flexibility to personalise email-marketing efforts with customers' names as well as information on products that interest them. Once the campaign has been executed, NetCRM tracks ROI metrics full-cycle to the sales transaction, providing accurate cost-of-acquisition statistics.
Schedule Management Enhances Productivity and Visibility - NetCRM includes a complete compliment of calendar and task management tools including automatic event reminders, attendee availability checking, resource management, priority-based task tracking and email notification of assigned tasks. Time spent on events, tasks and customer support cases can be tracked for billing to customers. Group calendars are also included for convenient access to departmental events. All these schedule management capabilities ensure high productivity while providing sales, marketing and support managers with good visibility into the workload and customer-facing activities of their representatives.
Knowledge Base Raises Customer Service Level - With the knowledge base capabilities of NetAnswers included in NetCRM, companies can track frequently asked questions, standard problem resolutions, known issues or special tips. NetAnswers allows information to be organised into different levels of topics and solutions, giving support representatives the ability to answer customer inquiries via email or phone based on their own experience as well as the collective and historical knowledge of the group. Customers and partners can access this information online 24x7 without the need to staff customer support during costly off-peak hours.
Partner Center Offers Ultimate Self-Service - Today's successful businesses increasingly rely on cooperative selling models, making partner management a vital part of business operations. NetCRM includes complete partner relationship management capabilities including an online partner center. Functionality with the partner center allows resellers, manufacturers' sales representatives, co-marketing partners, etc. to access information on their partner profile, place orders and view the status of existing orders, view reports on sales transactions, search the Knowledge Base, submit support cases and view the status of existing cases. They can view leads assigned to them and access reports on jointly managed customers.
XML Integration and Custom Records Ensures Complete Flexibility - NetCRM includes server-to-server integration capabilities with XML and can even be configured to allow for single sign-on authentication to enhance the user experience. Customisation capabilities make NetCRM completely extensible to specific business needs and allow businesses to define their own data records with complex relationships between each other and existing records and transactions.
Other NetCRM features also include various configurable user security levels, complete document management functionality, and intranet content publishing capabilities.
Pricing and Availability
NetCRM will be available in October. NetCRM pricing is $600 per user, per year; minimum 2 users.
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