Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

October 11, 2007

CRM From Salesforce.com Chosen by United Capital

By David Sims


Online CRM vendor Salesforce.com (News - Alert) has announced that United Capital Financial Advisers, a wealth management firm, has standardized on Salesforce for Financial Services. The company used the Force.com platform to integrate a Great Plains accounting system and Charles Schwab Portfolio Center with Salesforce.
 
“When we decided to deploy Salesforce, we were looking for a contact management system,” said Gary Roth, COO at United Capital Financial Advisers. “The Force.com platform has enabled us to integrate all of our business information into a central location, enabling us to save a tremendous amount of time that we used to spend on compiling and reporting data both internally and to our Board of Directors.”
 
The product also “helped us save time in terms of the records we maintain and must open to examination by regulatory agencies,” added Roth.
 
United Capital Financial Advisers grew over the past two years both organically and through acquisitions and, as a result, acquired and maintained key customer data in multiple, disparate systems. The Salesforce system consolidates this customer information from more than a dozen offices across the country. This consolidation helps ensure recordkeeping protocol is properly adhered to at all times while allowing for more coordinated company-wide client mailings.
 
United Capital Financial Advisers oversees more than $8 billion in client assets and provides a range of services including investment management solutions, goal-based financial advice, insurance, and other products.
 
Earlier this month, Travelocity chose Salesforce’s Software-as-a-Service CRM to “manage its partner marketing program and relationships with hotel chains, rental car companies, cruise lines and airlines.”

The product allows Travelocity sales and marketing staff in North America and Mexico to share information and collaborate. Salesforce.com partner Astadia deployed the product for Travelocity.
 
“Our partner marketing group tripled in size over the last three years. Before Salesforce, each of our team members was using spreadsheets or various other methods to track partner data, so we had no way of knowing all the activities in progress and how we could improve our efforts,” said Markus Huber, director of partner marketing at Travelocity.
 
“Everyone in our partner marketing organization uses Salesforce daily, and we are gaining tremendous momentum,” he added.
 
In September, on-demand CRM vendor Salesforce.com debuted Salesforce Winter ‘08, which will expand Salesforce from four to six major application product lines with two new applications — Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas.
 
Marc Benioff (News - Alert) and other company officials unveiled the new product at Dreamforce 07 in San Francisco. 
 
These two new applications will “deliver Salesforce to every employee in the enterprise and empower customers to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds,” Salesforce.com officials said, adding that, “the 24th generation of Salesforce will further extend salesforce.com’s leadership in the CRM market by using the Force.com platform to bring Web 2.0 community-based technologies to the entire suite of Salesforce CRM applications."
 
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
 


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