Entellium Wins Frost & Sullivan's Customer Service Leadership Award for Hosted CRM

Business Wire, Oct 6, 2005

SEATTLE -- Free Customer Support from CRM Usability Leader Rivals the "Experience that Enterprise Level Firms Usually Received at a Price"

Leading analyst group Frost & Sullivan has selected Entellium (http://www.entellium.com) for its 2005 Customer Service Leadership Award, given annually to the company it feels best demonstrates excellence in customer service leadership within the Hosted CRM industry. In addition, the recipient must have shown tremendous responsiveness to customer needs and continually focused on long and short-term customer profitability goals.

"I am extremely proud of this award because it underpins our brand values. We stand by our customer friendly policies of voluntary contracts, free live support for every user, and service level standards for all customers and clearly we're setting the benchmarks for the rest of the industry," said Paul Johnston, President and CEO of Entellium. "We're in the Customer Relationship Management business -- that's what CRM stands for. Charging a customer to have a relationship with you seems wrong when you are providing a service -- yet sadly this has become the norm in our industry. We recognize that customers have a choice, and more and more they are choosing Entellium because they see that great customer service is as important as their product selection."

To choose the recipient of this Award, Frost & Sullivan analyst teams track industry participants and monitor their customer service methods on an ongoing basis. The Award recipient is selected based upon extensive research collected from key market participants, secondary and technology sources, and customer interviews. Collected data is then cross tabulated to find the number one ranking company.

In addition to the methodology described above, there are specific criteria used in determining the final ranking of industry competitors. Entellium received the Award based on the following criteria:

--Value-added promotional support

--Providing value-added technology and services

--Responsiveness to customer needs

--Time to market

--Monitoring and addressing customer feedback

According to Frost & Sullivan, Entellium's "aggressive market positioning in the first year of its entry into North America provided SMB customers with an experience that enterprise level firms usually received at a price. Scores of SMB firms took to this novel model both in terms of new IT investments as well as defections from competition, thus reinforcing the unique value proposition of Entellium in the market."

This award comes days after Entellium was named a Market Leader by CRM Magazine. Like Frost & Sullivan, CRM Magazine also recognized Entellium's tremendous growth in the past year and ranked the company highest in the sales force automation category for "reputation for customer satisfaction."

Entellium develops CRM applications that are focused on making the daily lives of sales, service and marketing employees easier, with advanced automation features not found in any other hosted CRM solution. Their application includes many industry-first automation capabilities for a number of tasks that are still manual in other solutions. For example, Entellium's Report Automator(TM) lets users configure any report so that it is automatically generated and distributed at certain dates and times -- or in specified intervals -- in HTML or Excel format with up-to-the-minute customer data, enabling managers to focus on analyzing the reports, not running them.

Entellium customer Milestone Group, a professional services firm that helps technology companies solve revenue and growth challenges, echoed Frost & Sullivan's findings.

"The key thing for us was Entellium's high-touch support and training during the deployment process -- we worked with a dedicated account manager who was very knowledgeable and responsive," said John Meaney, partner at Milestone Group. "Product experts were only one click away with Entellium's built-in Live Chat feature, and getting help in real-time this way is invaluable."

Entellium also recently announced one of the largest deals in the hosted CRM industry's history -- a 5,000 seat deployment with Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corporation, the nation's largest privately-held mortgage company, for its sales associates in 600 offices nationwide.

In August, Entellium received top scores for usability, customer service and price in a head-to-head review by the venerable Network Computing Magazine, which reviewed six top hosted CRM providers. In this review, Entellium's $59 PRO-Activity Release landed in a virtual tie with Salesforce.com's (NYSE: CRM) $125 Enterprise Edition. Earlier this year, the company received top scores from Forrester Research, a leading analyst firm, in usability and cost in the 2005 Forrester Wave report: Hosted Sales Force Automation(1). Entellium also received a perfect 5.0 score for its free global support which includes live training and 24/7 live chat over the web.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit www.frost.com.