Summary
Cleanscape's leading-edge approach to serving the needs of its worldwide customer base was recently featured in Sales & Marketing Management Magazine.
Following are excerpts from Sales & Marketing Management's November 2000 article titled "Relationship Management: Cutting Costs with Web-Based CRM":
Wired Executive: Relationship Management
by Mark McMaster
Cleanscape Software launched last year with an asset that most startups could only hope for: a range of products and a 20-year client history acquired from IPT Corporations software division. The company took IPTs software line -- development automation tools for Linux, UNIX, and Windows -- modernized and repackaged it under the Cleanscape name. Unfortunately, the inherited customer information was organized in a flat database, not useful for marketing purposes.
"One of the first things we wanted to do was to set up a process to manage and maintain our relationship with our customers," said Brent Duncan, director of marketing for Cleanscape. "We wanted to unit the functions of our company under a single, relational database: marketing sales, service, accounting -- even engineering."
Traditionally that would call for an expensive Customer Relationship Management software package, requiring not only a network linking all users but also an IT staff to maintain that infrastructure and manage the software applications when changes in data organization were required.
Duncan instead chose an emerging alternative in the world of CRM, an application service provider model offered by Neteos Inc. Rather than residing on an internal server, the software is hosted on Neteos' network along with client companies data. Information is exchanged over the Internet through a custom-designed, secure, interface. "Anywhere there's Internet service, a salesperson, manager, marketer, or accountant can log on and maintain our customer relationship," Duncan said.
The complete article can be seen in Sales & Marketing Management Magazine's November 2000 issue, or at http://www.salesandmarketing.com/
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