San Francisco September 30, 2002 Vital Link Business Systems, a provider of remote management solutions, has standardized on a customer relationship management solution from salesforce.com in a bid to integrate its sales, marketing and customer support information.
Vital Link provides Internet-based management solutions for restaurants, bars, convenience stores and multi-unit business, including remote audio/video monitoring and data archiving systems, a wireless pour management system and a point-of-sale (POS) system.
The company was using a traditional client-server system for the customer support component of CRM but found that system to be expensive and resource-intensive. The company's sales, marketing and customer service information for its Remote Video Monitoring Beverage Tracker and point-of-sale products was spread across various spreadsheets and databases, making it difficult to effectively evaluate the customer life cycle.
The company realized that it needed an integrated solution that would allow it to manage the pipeline, provide an accurate forecast and determine the performance of its marketing and customer service efforts.
While the company already invested in a client/server package for customer support, Vital Link believed that the existing implementation couldn't scale to meet its growing needs. The client-server system was too costly, too complex to get the entire organization to adopt the system and it required too much involvement from the company's information technology (IT) staff and outside consultants, Vital Link felt.
Ultimately, Vital Link opted to switch to salesforce.com. Ciaran OBroin, marketing manager of Vital Link Business Systems, said: "Within days, and without IT involvement, salesforce.com gave us a 360-degree view of our customer data. We can finally determine the customer lead source, manage the pipeline, justify our marketing investment and better service our customers, because real time, pertinent information is at our fingertips."
OBroin also noted that while salesforce.com provided the functionality Vital Link needed, the company also found salesforce.com's offering affordable.
