Gomez, Inc. Standardizes on Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition; Leader of Internet Quality Measurement Replaces Siebel Client/Server Model with Web-based CRM Solution

Business Wire, Nov 4, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 4, 2002

Salesforce.com, the market leader in online customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Gomez, Inc., the technology leader in Internet quality measurement, is using salesforce.com's Enterprise Edition to streamline and maximize its CRM initiatives. Gomez had originally purchased Siebel (Nasdaq:SEBL) for sales force automation but found its original investment was unable to meet its changing CRM needs without upgrades that would be prohibitively costly.

After evaluating a number of CRM alternatives, Gomez selected salesforce.com for its quick implementation, ease of use, low cost of administration and overall affordability. Up and running in less than 60 days, salesforce.com has significantly increased marketing's contribution to sales and boosted revenue -- more than paying back Gomez's initial investment in the service. Salesforce.com has also provided a flexible utility to optimize business rules on the fly without technical assistance, was able to cut Gomez's sales cycle in half and helped enhance revenue predictability, fueling investor confidence.

"People use applications that make their jobs easier or make them more money. Salesforce.com does both," Thomas Wong, vice president of marketing at Gomez, said. "We're using salesforce.com to deepen our current customer relationships and to build strong new ones. For example, we've seen average revenue per new customer grow about 20 percent."

With salesforce.com, Gomez gains a real-time, holistic view of its customers and prospects. Gomez sales representatives use salesforce.com to quickly customize reports, and formerly complex processes that required a significant amount of time and IT resources have become simple tasks that sales representatives can perform on their own. Marketing has also used salesforce.com to measure ROI, and has already demonstrated, through the application's reporting capacity, a five-fold increase in marketing leads converted to actual revenue. Customer service leverages salesforce.com to provide quick, prompt and accurate responses to client requests.

"This month, product managers will begin to extend the real-time customer data captured in the application service to dynamically plan future Gomez product and service releases to meet clients' needs," Wong said.

"To really maximize a customer relationship, you need to understand your customer's needs and challenges. Further, that information must be reliable and accessible across the organization," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Salesforce.com understands that and offers affordable, easy-to-use solutions that bring entire companies closer to their customers. It's extremely satisfying to see a company like Gomez experiencing such great success with salesforce.com."

More than 5,000 customers use salesforce.com's online CRM solution, including global leaders such as Le Meridien, Autodesk, and USA Today. Salesforce.com delivers its CRM solution as an online information utility via a Web Services infrastructure. In the past year, salesforce.com has added more CRM customers than have Siebel (Nasdaq:SEBL), PeopleSoft (Nasdaq:PSFT), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL), and SAP (NYSE:SAP) combined.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com builds and delivers customer relationship management (CRM) applications as scalable online services. The salesforce.com product suite -- Team Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Offline Edition -- gives companies of all sizes a complete 360-degree view of the customer. The company's award-winning CRM solutions provide integrated online sales force automation, customer service and support management, and marketing automation applications to help companies meet the complex challenges of global customer communication. Salesforce.com has received considerable recognition in the industry, including two Five-Star ratings from PC Magazine, two Deploy Awards from InfoWorld, Red Herring 100, Upside Hot 100, Investor's Choice Award from Enterprise Outlook, Editor's Choice from TMCLabs, Top 10 CRM Implementation from Aberdeen Group, and InfoWorld's 2001 CRM Technology of the Year. Founded in 1999, salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia. Salesforce.com customers include Autodesk, Arvato Services, Dow Jones Newswires, Ericsson Microelectronics, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Kikkoman Corp., Le Meridien, Paymentech, PMI Mortgage Insurance, Putnam Lovell NBF, Siemens PT&D, Suntory Foods, Textron Fastening Systems, USA Today and Wachovia.

About Gomez

Gomez, Inc., the technology leader in Internet Quality Measurement, provides financial services firms and other leading companies with customer experience measurement, benchmarking, and strategic consulting services to help them build successful e-businesses. Founded in 1997 and based in Waltham, Mass., Gomez integrates actionable research and applied analytics with performance measurement services to provide a comprehensive view of the entire customer experience. For more information, visit www.Gomez.com.