PeopleSoft Details Latest CRM

In March, the company unveiled three new modules to its PeopleSoft CRM suite. Last month, it officially launched version 8.9 of the suite and talked about its so-called prescriptive analytics capabilities and a fourth new module. On Tuesday, the Pleasanton, Calif., vendor finally revealed availability and more details about its CRM line.

Now it can be told: PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9--including the newly unveiled Revenue Management, Student Lifecycle Marketing, Wealth Management and Customer Portfolio Management applications--will be generally available June 23.

"We've created a consistent experience with [version] 8.9," said Steve Roop, vice president of marketing for PeopleSoft CRM. "We've embedded in our software a natural language processing engine and a learning engine, which deliver intelligent suggestions and recommendations to call center agents answering customers' support questions. And now agents answering customer e-mails no longer have to go to a separate system to check customers' order, billing and complaint history. This is a major improvement over e-mail response engines from two years ago."

Version 8.9 adds 15 new applications to the CRM suite. In CRM Sales, highlights include a new Strategic Account Planning module that helps organizations detail strategies, tactics and metrics for increasing revenue from a company's most important accounts. A new Services Management module helps telecommunications and other service-based industries manage the contract life-cycle changes, including renewals, updates and cancellations.

New features in CRM 8.9 Marketing include recommendation and scripting capabilities that guide agents through cross- and upselling, as well as retaining disgruntled customers. A new customer segment designer helps organizations focus on those customers most likely to deliver the greatest return on marketing investment. In addition, marketing departments can now centrally manage all their direct, e-mail, inbound and partner campaigns.

Speaking of the channel: As part of its CRM push, PeopleSoft also has released a new Partner Relationship Management (PRM) suite with six applications. Partner Platform holds the data model and handles partner life-cycle management. Partner Sales distributes leads and monitors their progression into qualified opportunities. Partner Commerce makes use of the embedded prescriptive analytics engine to recommend products. The marketing module executes targeted programs. Call center agents using Partner Service can contact solution providers to handle service and support duties. And Partner Planning provides tools for creating business plans.

"The big theme throughout all of the applications is usability," said Roop. "We hired usability engineers from Sun [Microsystems] and Apple [Computer], and now spend more time up-front on the user interface. This is the first CRM release that has gone through this new process."