Siebel CRM OnDemand Delivers Industry's First Prebuilt Hosted Contact Center Solution

Business Wire, March 29, 2005

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Organizations of All Sizes Can Seamlessly Manage Customer Communications across Voice, Email, and Web Channels with Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7

Siebel Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SEBL), a leading provider of business applications software, today announced the availability of Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7. This release extends the capabilities of Siebel CRM OnDemand by providing the first and only hosted contact center solution available as a prebuilt option within hosted CRM, enabling both enterprises and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to easily manage multichannel customer communications. Industry analysts estimate that more than 70 percent of all customer interactions occur through "live" phone conversations or interactive voice response (IVR) interactions alone. With the Siebel Contact OnDemand module, organizations can now deploy a world-class contact center to manage these critical customer interactions across sales, marketing, and service without having to build a traditional contact center infrastructure, which requires costly investments in hardware, software, and customization.

"Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7 is the industry's first solution to deliver to both enterprises and SMBs a fast-to-deploy, easy-to-use, and highly robust hosted contact center that doesn't require additional infrastructural investments," said Bruce Cleveland, Senior Vice President and General Manager, OnDemand and SMB at Siebel Systems. "With this release, Siebel Systems continues to expose the powerful capabilities embedded in our world-class technology platform while also further distancing ourselves from tactical, generic, hosted SFA offerings that force customers to undertake time-consuming and expensive customization to address basic requirements that we support out of the box."

"The introduction of Siebel Contact OnDemand within Ingersoll-Rand allows us to standardize business processes across multiple customer service centers. The results have been reductions of cost and implementation complexity," said Rob Martens, Director of Global Front Office Technology at Ingersoll-Rand, a leading innovation and solutions provider for the major global markets of climate control, industrial solutions, infrastructure, and security and safety. "The ability to deploy and manage a completely hosted CRM solution with built-in contact center functionality means that our businesses can focus more time on servicing our accounts and less time worrying about integration and development. Siebel's proven track record with existing on premise deployments at Ingersoll-Rand, combined with the deployment options Siebel CRM OnDemand offers, made our selection process a simple one."

The Only Third-Generation Hosted Contact Center Solution That Delivers Maximum ROI

The Siebel Contact OnDemand solution represents the only third-generation hosted contact center solution available today. First-generation solutions from other generic hosted CRM vendors only provide very limited software development kits (SDKs) and basic application programming interfaces (APIs) for building expensive custom integrations to third-party solutions and traditional contact center infrastructures. Second-generation solutions, which Siebel Systems has uniquely provided since January 2004, deliver preintegrated contact center capabilities requiring no customization or investment in infrastructure. With Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7, Siebel Systems has further raised the bar by delivering a hosted contact center solution as a prebuilt extension to its hosted CRM offering, thus enabling more advanced workflows, more complete visibility across functions, and better business insight into customer communications. As a result, organizations will be able to maximize their ROI by providing the highest levels of service to their customers and deliver a more consistent customer experience to drive cross-selling and up-selling.

The result of more than ten thousand hours of research and development, Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7 provides the following key benefits:

Complete customer communications management

--Uniquely streamlines agent productivity with a unified communications desktop that provides a 360-degree view of customer interactions across voice, email, and Web channels

--Drives consistent customer communications across sales, marketing, and service

--Captures real-time activities and interactions from multiple channels in a single database

--Provides deep customer insight with comprehensive analytics across contact center and CRM interactions

Fast, flexible, and affordable built-in hosted contact center

--Enables computer telephony integration (CTI), IVR, automatic call distribution (ACD), and PBX capabilities built-in to hosted CRM solution, eliminating need to purchase, integrate, or maintain hardware or software

--Enables flexibility of agents regardless of location, including work-at-home employees

--Delivers easily scalable capacity to meet business demand due to promotions, seasonality, or recalls