August 7, 2000

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PeopleSoft Provides Analytical Apps For CRM

Effectiveness Workbench tools analyze sales, marketing, and customer-support operations

By Jeff Sweat

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n an effort to help companies analyze their use of front-office software, PeopleSoft Inc. last week unveiled a handful of analytical applications aimed at customer-relationship management functions.

Three of the new products--which make up a series called Effectiveness Workbench--are focused on making sure that a company's sales, marketing, and service organizations are operating efficiently to serve clients.

Sales Effectiveness Workbench analyzes sales pipelines and cycle time. Marketing Effectiveness Workbench provides feedback on the success of marketing campaigns through metrics such as the number of leads generated. Support Effectiveness Workbench analyzes call-center workloads and customer responses.

"It's not exactly analytical CRM. It's a hybrid," says Meta Group analyst Steve Bonadio. In the future, PeopleSoft will focus more on pure customer analysis, a market served by vendors such as E.piphany Inc.

The new applications join another customer-facing analytical app, Customer Profitability, which PeopleSoft introduced earlier this year to help businesses determine which clients are most important to their success.

All four of the applications draw on the data model and CRM business rules found in Vantive Corp.'s Vantive 8.5. PeopleSoft acquired Vantive last year.

Alta Resources, an interaction center outsourcer and longtime Vantive user, hopes the analytic apps will help it uncover customer trends in its interaction center. "If I've talked to a customer eight times in a month, I don't know if that's good or bad right now," says Alta chief technology officer Bill Parry.

In addition to the Workbench products, PeopleSoft debuted the Customer Scorecard. The software uses a balanced-scorecard model to help businesses determine how well they're satisfying customers.

PeopleSoft and applications competitor Oracle provide an analytics architecture that focuses primarily on their own transactions.

Although they're not very open to third-party or legacy data, Bonadio says the enterprise resource planning vendors are being a lot more nimble in building out the analytical infrastructure than traditional CRM vendors.

All Effectiveness Workbench products will ship by year's end, priced starting at $70,000.

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