Satuit CRM Picked by Great Lakes Advisors

Satuit Technologies has announced that Great Lakes Advisors, an independent employee-owned investment management firm in Chicago, has deployed SatuitCRM to help streamline the company's relationship management processes and databases.

Great Lakes is using SatuitCRM, a CRM system designed specifically for the financial services industry, to merge customer information from five legacy databases into a single, centrally located system. Great Lakes currently manages over $3 billion.

Prior to selecting SatuitCRM, Great Lakes was using a variety of databases, including Microsoft (News - Alert) Access, Outlook, Excel and ACT!, to manage its clients and prospective customer lists. The firm wanted a product to help keep client lists up-to-date, streamline a prospect and request-for-proposal list, simplify mass mailings, and manage sales opportunities. Over a period of six months, Great Lakes evaluated six CRM products.

Heather Ludlum, marketing officer for Great Lakes Advisors, said with the firm's previous system, "we were limited by an inability to track e-mail and mailing histories and to work off-line or remotely, as well as by the data entry space and number of users."

A couple weeks ago Satuit announced the general availability of SatuitCRM version 10.6.

The latest version of the company's CRM product provides support for the latest Microsoft platforms, and includes more than 30 enhancements "in direct response to user requests," company officials say, adding that SatuitCRM now supports MS SQL 2005, Internet Explorer 7.0, Windows Vista operating system and Longhorn Server.

As well as SatuitCRM version 10.6, the company has released version 2.0 of its Outlook Add-in, which allows users to add new contacts, activities, and notes directly from the Outlook interface.

Njal Larson, senior vice president, product strategy for Satuit Technologies, said the company is "focused solely on meeting the CRM demands of the financial services industry."

Among the highlights for SatuitCRM 10.6 are Embedded Application Integration, which allows client displays of third-party application data and functionality in the SatuitCRM user interface, and Support for Unicode character sets, such as Kanji.

There are also completely rebuilt internal calendaring functions with individual, team and company wide calendar views, high level functionality for recurring tasks and auto-notification when tasks are created for others.

----------

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.