Direct marketing company deploys apps for visibility into customers' experience
San Francisco — May 9, 2005 — K/P Corp., which provides direct marketing solutions and business process consulting, along with fulfillment, mailing and printing services, said it is using customer relationship management (CRM) technology from salesforce.com to measure the success of its own marketing and sales campaigns, as well as those of its customers, by tracking campaign response rates within the solution.
"With new sales and marketing management at our company, we wanted a better way to track how our customers were making their way through the company — from leads, to sales, to support and to managing our customers' own marketing efforts," said Jim Benson, chief technology officer, K/P Corp. "Salesforce gives us the tools we need for all of these various stages in the sales cycle. And because it's a hosted solution, we were able roll it out in a timely manner."
salesforce.com offers such products as Salesforce and Supportforce, a suite of CRM applications that companies can use to share and manage information on-demand. Salesforce and Supportforce are built on the Sforce client/service integration platform and include the Customforce tool for complete on-demand customization.
K/P Corp. said it needed a full CRM solution to provide both sales force automation and marketing automation. The company selected salesforce.com because its applications could provide complete visibility into every step of the sales and marketing cycle. For instance, sales staff are able to monitor how long a customer has been waiting in the "Install Cycle" and can take action to make sure that programs are installed as soon as possible. Or, managers can encourage sales people to view deal progress on the spot instead of waiting for end-of-month reports, which encourages them to close more deals.
"Using Customforce, we've been able to create new ways to keep track of customer cases," said Benson. "For example, we want to keep the case management process very simple in our self-service portal so that customers find it easy to submit information. With Supportforce, we can keep it simple for customers and still allow the business manager assigned to each customer account to go deeper into the cases, creating custom reports that indicate where problems might be cropping up across products or departments."
The provider said Customforce, which is built into Salesforce and Supportforce, enables business users to customize their CRM and create new on-demand applications through a point-and-click interface.
