NetSuite, Inc. today launched NetCRM-Services Edition. Designed to meet the specific needs of services-based businesses, NetCRM-Services Edition offers features that cannot be found in any other stand-alone, on-demand CRM application. These service-specific features consist of service item management, project/job tracking, client self-service center, advanced activity and time tracking, and document management, in addition to traditional CRM functionality including marketing campaign management, client support and opportunity management. In conjunction with NetCRM’s advanced customization capabilities, NetCRM-Services Edition gives service companies the flexibility and power to cater the feature-rich application to meet their exact needs. Finally, when deployed as part of the complete NetSuite ERP/CRM solution, services-based businesses can go from proposal to invoice in a single integrated solution. For more information on NetCRM-Services Edition, please visit www.netcrm.com/services.
In addressing the needs of services-based businesses, one of the failings of traditional stand-alone on-demand CRM software applications is that they are designed around managing sales opportunities, rather than long-standing client engagements. For example, attaching on-going jobs to an “opportunity record” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Client engagements for services-based businesses do not end with the closing of the opportunity, but rather are just beginning since they must then deliver their services, tracking the project through activity and time management with various service-delivery personnel involved.
NetCRM-Services Edition addresses what is lacking in existing on-demand CRM applications and adds many critical tools needed for sustained, project/job-centric client management. First, NetCRM builds all data around a client record, which is in direct contrast to traditional CRM systems that are much more deal-focused or opportunity-focused. This enables on-going projects and new projects to be tracked as part of the on-going client relationship. Secondly, NetCRM-Services Edition adds features that are specific to the needs of services companies such as job/project tracking, and advanced activity time tracking, which is not offered by other CRM packages. NetCRM-Services Edition also adds new dashboards for service personnel with Key Performance Indicators and Report Snapshots specific to them.
NetCRM-Services Edition is also easy to customize to the industry functionality of vertical markets such as financial services, consulting services or legal services. And when used as a part of the complete NetSuite ERP/CRM solution, NetCRM Services Edition becomes even more powerful. Managing the multiple aspects of a project, from time tracking to employee specific billing rates to contract billing schedules through revenue recognition and even expense reports for project teams, NetSuite is the ideal solution for services companies.
“NetCRM is the first on-demand solution to address the needs of two-thirds of businesses in the U.S. economy: service companies,” says Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “By aligning resources seamlessly around client needs, NetCRM helps companies go from lip service to true client service. NetCRM gives service companies new tools so they know more and sell more to their clients.”
“We’re in the business of serving our clients, and we’ve learned from experience that having their information available to us in real-time is the best way to serve them,” said Patrick Arnold, VP of Marketing for San Jose-based Filice Insurance (www.filice.com). “NetCRM has saved us over $200,000 as we have better coordinated the sales team’s activities and evaluated on a moment-by-moment basis the telemarketers and entire sales cycle. Now with the new advanced ability to better manage service delivery and projects we expect to grow our business even more.”
In Forrester Research’s just-released study entitled “TechRankings™: Hosted Sales Force Automation (SFA).” NetSuite outscored the competition in the major “Sales Management” category, beating its competitors including salesforce.com and Siebel in some of the most important functional areas of SFA including Forecasting, Opportunity Management, Activity Management, Dashboards, Document Management, and Pricing & Products. In addition to these award-winning capabilities, NetCRM-Services Edition adds services-specific features companies could only dream of before, allowing them to excel in client service:
*Services Sales Management: Manage the complete sales cycle from lead to opportunity, to proposal generation then contract with the click of a button and even through forecasting service bookings and the resources required to support them, NetCRM-Services Edition allows for complete end-to-end sales management and service planning with a single view of the client.
*Services Item Catalog: Catalog a portfolio of services including flexible client-specific price levels and discounting rules based on packages or units purchased for sales to new prospects as well as recurring sales to preferred clients with pre-negotiated price levels and terms.
*Project/Job Tracking: Manage and track multiple types of projects or jobs such as fixed price, time and materials, and cost plus with linked activities and complete visibility at the client level to all stakeholders across sales, service delivery and support personnel. Multiple-project jobs and sub-projects can be linked with customers as well as with opportunities, making complex many-to-many relationship structures easy to manage.
*Advanced Calendaring and Activity Time Tracking: Delivering powerful group calendaring capabilities, NetCRM-Services Edition lets users share calendars, develop schedules per project activity, and monitor assets, all of which helps business processes flow more smoothly. All activities including tasks, calls, and meeting events, have time tracked against them and are linked at the client level empowering individuals to manage their schedules more effectively, while giving managers full visibility into the activities of their employees on an individual or per project basis.
*Client Self-Service Center: Keep clients abreast of the latest project status, past bookings, outstanding quotes, and even client-specific shared documents all in a secure password-protected center. Clients can also search knowledge bases, find answers to frequently asked questions or enter a trouble ticket against their service incident history.
*Service Personnel Specific Dashboards: from senior executive or partner, through project manager, to technical consultant, NetCRM-Services Edition gives you role-specific Dashboards for real-time visibility into services forecasting, revenue, status of projects, project alerts, client support incidents and more. Dashboards help service-based companies keep a finger on the pulse of their business freeing individuals to focus on the client to garner their business, deliver on promises, manage the engagement for profit and maximize client service.
*Document Management: Store content such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and many more file types on a per-client, per-project or aggregate basis with the ability to organize and set access restrictions per folder. Additionally, files can be published internally to intranets and externally to the corporate web site or client self-service centers with highly personalized content via powerful one-to-one publishing tools.
*Client Support & Service: Record and track all client contact by e-mail, the Web and phone along with time spent per incident and use automatic escalation rules to meet service level agreements while providing customer service personnel with knowledge management tools that expedite trouble ticket handling.
Pricing and Availability
NetCRM-Services Edition is available now and is offered at $79 per user per month
