Customer support issues are now resolved 60% faster because of the Service Cloud The Sales Cloud helped the company achieve 83% revenue growth SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that The Sant Corporation, the leader in proposal and sales document automation software, runs its entire business in the cloud with Salesforce CRM (http://www.salesforce.com/crm). The company deployed the Service Cloud (http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/) and the Sales Cloud (http://www.salesforce.com/crm/sales-force-automation/) from salesforce.com and achieved 83% revenue growth and now resolves customer support issues 60% faster. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO) "We were using spreadsheets and a contact management application to run sales. As a growing company, this antiquated approach prevented us from taking the company to the next level. We needed a completely new approach to conducting business," said Brian Vass, vice president of marketing at The Sant Corporation. "When we explored various solutions in the market, we were impressed by the number of companies talking about their success with Salesforce CRM. No other vendor could illustrate they had so many happy customers." Sant deployed the Service Cloud and Sales Cloud across customer support and sales, and leveraged Force.com to quickly and easily create applications to automate other areas of the business including the professional services organization and customer feedback. The cloud computing solutions completely transformed how the company operates, and staff across the entire company -- including company executives -- are all enjoying the benefits of instant access to real-time customer information. Previously, Sant's Technical Support team was using spreadsheets to log and track customer support issues. This manual process prevented Sant from providing its customers with the level of support they expected. Today, Sant's customers report issues via phone, email, and web-to-case forms on the company's website. All of these interactions are logged and tracked in the Service Cloud and the company has real-time insight into case volume, status, resolution time, agent workload, and much more. In fact, since deploying the Service Cloud, Sant is now resolving customer support issues 60% faster. Sant has also automated its customer feedback process with the Service Cloud. Customers automatically receive survey invitations when Sant closes a support case, complete a professional services engagement, or launch a new version of Sant's software application. Feedback from these surveys is rolled-up to dashboards that are monitored by department managers and executives daily. Sant strives to provide exceptional products and services to its customers, and this continuous feedback loop is critical in helping the company measure the effectiveness in accomplishing this goal. All of the work is done using a custom object, workflow rules, email triggers, dashboards, and ClickTools, an application available on the Force.com AppExchange. The Sales Cloud enables Sant to capture leads from the company's web site, conduct targeted outreach, and track conversion rates and revenue by individual campaign. Rich reporting and dashboards provide unprecedented insight into success metrics so the marketing team can continually optimize their efforts. In addition, the Sales Cloud reinforces Sant's sales process, supports forecasting and planning, and gives staff and management alike a constant read on the pipeline. "Salesforce CRM has helped us improve our business in every way, and it's translating into greater profitability," added Vass. "We've reaped all these benefits of cloud computing without the hassle of deploying and maintaining software. We've added ourselves to the long list of happy salesforce.com customers." In addition, Sant has automated its professional services organization with the Sales Cloud. Sant's professional services organization provides consulting and training to support customers' implementations. Every professional services engagement is tracked and managed in the Sales Cloud - from initial sale to final delivery. Engagements are associated with the Account record, providing all employees with visibility into the customer's service history. Prior to automating this process in the Sales Cloud, all professional services engagements were managed using emails and spreadsheets. This was an inefficient process and didn't provide employees with visibility into the customer's service history. The automation is comprised of a series of custom objects, workflow rules, email triggers, and dashboards that were created by Sant. For more information on cloud computing, visit http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing. The Sant Corporation is one of the 59,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2009. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered. About The Sant Corporation The Sant Corporation is a provider of proven software and expertise that improves sales effectiveness. We help companies who provide value-based solutions win more business by accelerating the production of persuasive proposals, RFP responses, presentations, and related documents. Sant's applications integrate with Salesforce.com and are available in the AppExchange. Sant is a privately held corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has operations in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. For more information, please visit http://www.santcorp.com/. About salesforce.com Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/crm/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company's Force.com Platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) enables customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com's (http://salesforce.com/) real-time, multi-tenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing. As of April 30, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 59,300 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE. Copyright (c) 2009 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO http://photoarchive.ap.org/ DATASOURCE: salesforce.com CONTACT: Katy Dormer of salesforce.com, +1-415-901-8595, Web Site: http://www.salesforce.com/

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