Siebel Systems has dominated the CRM market since 1998, outpacing its rivals in both market share and in the eyes of the experts. For example, Siebel is the only occupant of the upper right corner of the famous Gartner Research "magic quadrant" for CRM vendors. As the acknowledged leader in a rapidly growing field Siebel opened up multiple channels of communications for its customers, including telephone, web, e-mail, fax, web collaboration, text- based chat, and voice over IP.

The only channel it missed was the mail.

Since the dot-com bubble burst exposed critical flaws in "new economy" business models, companies have largely avoided the big-ticket IT projects that were supposed to transform their business. The current economic climate has led many c-suite executives to favor projects that offer cost reductions and deliver measurable ROI over monolithic CRM systems that leave a broad footprint on the organization. Siebel Systems has clearly felt the pinch with year-over-year sales down 28 percent and profits off by 61 percent.

More importantly, CRM in general has come under fire as a major underachiever. Gartner has forecast that more than half of all CRM projects will have failed by 2006 and that the majority of companies have underestimated costs by 40 to 75 per cent. PR Newswire quantifies the failure rates at 80 percent. In a new Accenture survey of Fortune 1000 executives, 75 percent believe that flawed execution plans are the leading cause of CRM breakdown. According to a 2001 survey by Gartner Group, Inc. about 60 percent of all CRM projects fail, mainly due to the relatively poor quality of the data that is fed into the applications.

"A CRM solution is only as good as the quality of the customer data that feeds it," said Scott Nelson, vice president and research area director for Gartner Research. High-quality, well-integrated customer data is the cornerstone of a successful CRM effort."

The failures are largely due to the substitution of technology for strategy, which of course would have to include a way to feed clean, updated data into the system.

"The document distribution system needs to be linked into the broader CRM solution," said Scott Nelson. "This ensures that the material is up to date, that it has been personalized, that it builds on previous interactions. Many firms understand this with regard to their Web sites, but forget about it with regard to physical collateral material. But this is a major inconsistency."

According to Gartner, only about 15% of all CRM projects include any sort of document strategy.

Recognizing that their multi-channel approach had neglected to factor in hard copy document distribution, Siebel Systems decided to shore up the value proposition of its offering through a partnership with Pitney Bowes to create solutions that tie the transactional mail channel to their CRM application suites.

Benefits of Transactional Mail
Transactional mail is the most regular and reliable customer touch point available to a company. The monthly bill or statement has a 100% hit rate-it's virtually always opened and read. This is a marked contrast with the hit rate for direct mail-2-3% would be considered successful. Many credit card companies already leverage the transactional mail envelope for marketing inserts. But according to Bernie Gracy, Vice President of Pitney Bowes Enterprise Integration Solutions, next generation transactional mail will move away from marketing inserts in favor of marketing messages that are billboarded or embedded directly onto the statement itself.

"The results of mail campaigns are predictable and consistent from one to another and can be easily refined and targeted for improved results," said Gracy. "Mail is less intrusive than email or telemarketing campaigns and each piece has a longer shelf life."

The value of the Siebel-Pitney Bowes relationship is that it enables coordinated interaction with existing and potential customers across all touch points - mail, email, web, parcel, point of sale and call center - according to customer and company preferences. "Data from the entire messaging process is gathered and made available to optimize each customer experience and better target the next mailing," said Mikael Hook, an analyst in the eCommerce Group of Current Analysis.

An Accurate View of the Customer
According to the Forrester Research report "The Demise of CRM" (June 1999), less than 2 percent of companies that are currently implementing CRM applications report having a single view of their customers across sales, marketing and customer-service channels. A full 40 percent do not even attempt to tackle the job of integrating customer data scattered and isolated throughout the enterprise.

Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies provides customers of Siebel Systems with an array of data cleansing technology, techniques and services needed to achieve accurate and complete view of the customer across multiple sources of customer databases and lines of business.

The combination of Pitney Bowes and Siebel gives users the ability to integrate data across the enterprise and create a single, clean and highly accurate view of a customer's information for sales, marketing and customer-service purposes is the only way to achieve the "single customer view" that allows the tailoring of messages and offerings to a customer based on past interactions with the company and personal preference.

Mail Status Intelligence
The Siebel and Pitney Bowes partnership better enables the coordination and optimization of outbound and inbound communications. Production process and distribution analytics from SiteView and DFWorks allows mail piece information from each step of the production process to be displayed in an easily interpreted graphical format. Users can see if the document for an individual mail piece has been printed, inserted and sorted. Each process step is time and date stamped providing valuable information for CRM and production efficiency needs. In applications where return mail is involved (i.e. business reply cards or payment remittance envelopes) the multi-step piece tracking module can display the status of the response with Mailcode's PostBackOffice trace and track solutions.

PostBackOffice captures information from document data streams, mail pieces, sorters and other sources. This data is consolidated by the USPS Confirm® delivery information to create a powerful data warehouse. Within this data rich archive resides each mail piece image and unique details such as recipient address, barcodes and physical dimensions that can be used for mail piece integrity verification, proof of mailing and delivery confirmation.

And because this data is accessible via the Web, it can be made available throughout the enterprise. The call center rep can have complete visibility into the document channel. Individual mail pieces can be tracked through the USPS mail stream - without a tracking number. Delivery can be forecasted based upon USPS estimates and actuals, which can be followed up with an e-mail notification, a phone call or a visit from a representative.

"The expertise of Pitney Bowes in track and trace, customer response, RFM metrics and undeliverable as addressed mail will enable our joint clients to significantly reduce unnecessary expenditures associated with inaccurate, redundant business information and will create new revenue channels by leveraging their monthly billing process for marketing initiatives," said Catherine Cherubino, Senior Managing Director of Software and Industry Alliances for Siebel Systems."Joint customers can integrate the Pitney Bowes messaging analytics package into a variety of Siebel eBusiness Applications."