According to Aberdeen Group, 95 per cent of interviewed companies are happy with their CRM solutions in general and with Siebel in particular and some 90 per cent of them said theyd recommend the solution to others contemplating a CRM deployment. These conclusions from Aberdeen jar clearly with the ones elicited by Nucleus Research and by leaked internal customer satisfaction report from Siebel itself, which last week highlighted complaints from flagship users.
Furthermore Aberdeens report concluded that an excess of 87 per cent realised a greater than 10 per cent reduction in operating expenses, 73 per cent said that they would either deploy additional seats or install an upgrade and more than three-quarters said Siebel Systems was performing better or the same in all aspects of its business compared with when they first purchased their Siebel Solutions.
Siebel customers also reported favourably when asked about the on-time and on-budget delivery of their deployments. More than two thirds (69 per cent) reported implementations within + 10 per cent of expected delivery and nearly three quarters (71 per cent) said their projects were completed with under a 10 per cent variance from plan.
Operating costs also declined with the introduction of the Siebel system. For more than 87 per cent of the customers surveyed, average weighted operating costs declined by 10.4 per cent with the use of Siebel technology.
Customer satisfaction and customer retention have significant impacts on the bottom-line, as do revenue increases for reasons that are more obvious. The business literature has provided examples of how improved customer satisfaction leads to better customer retention and, ultimately, bottom-line results.
For example, a 10 per cent improvement in customer retention and increased revenues and a 14 per cent increase in customer satisfaction, though small, can provide all the justification any company needs to implement a CRM system, the Aberdeen Group reports.
Siebel 7 introduced a number of changes to Siebel 2000, including a thin-client architecture causing many organisations to rethink their business processes, IT environments and hardware configurations. This led to a consequent fall-off in customer satisfaction from 8 to 7.07 (scale of 0 to 10). Other complaints relate to pricing and to the ease of doing business with the Company.
Siebel and every CRM vendor will remain challenged to meet the simultaneous and often contradictory demands for ease of use, functional richness, and low cost of ownership characteristic of the mainstream adopters. The transition to web-based architectures and the increased flexibility with respect to application integration will speed the pace of adoption in this phase and will help reconcile these at times conflicting objectives, Aberdeen concludes.
This survey was conducted to 1,400 companies using Siebel and geographically distributed through North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Japan and China with a response rate of 26 per cent.
Filipe Samora
2003-04-23
Em Foco – Pessoa