PeopleSoft Aims to Simplify the Customer Experience

PeopleSoft today released the PeopleSoft CRM 8.8 Productivity Pack, which includes seven new products and dozens of new functional enhancements. According to Brad Wilson, vice president of marketing for PeopleSoft CRM, the announcement is part of PeopleSoft's "ongoing commitment to provide a better total ownership experience for clients." "It's a mid-year update to 8.8. We're trying to make PeopleSoft easier to implement, use, and maintain," he says. The product enhancements focus on three primary areas: packaged business-process integration, new and enhanced productivity-related features, and advanced synchronization with Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes. The business-process integration pack is prepackaged integration software for PeopleSoft CRM to connect to Oracle and SAP for specific business processes, including order management, service request materials authorization, and field fulfillment. "Some clients want middleware and some want to nail two things directly together," Wilson says. "About half of our CRM sales is new business to new customers, and part of that is to make integration as simple and low-cost as possible." "We have had AppConnect, but we want to offer more," adds Andrew Leigh, senior product marketing manager, PeopleSoft CRM. "Customers don't want an ubersolution. They want the right integration solution for each situation." According to Leigh, the integration pack is based on best practices, and is process-aware integration instead of just data-aware integration. "The goal is to simplify the complexity of integration," he says. The productivity pack also includes enhanced server-to-server integration to Notes and Outlook. "It's not client based; it's the first server to server--based product," Wilson says. "New information will propagate automatically. There's no need to push a sync button." The PeopleSoft CRM 8.8 Productivity Pack also includes a collection of functional enhancements for usability. For example, users can track leads for specific projects from prospects to project and take over through the project management phase. There are do-not-call indicators that tack on business logic to each account when a customer calls in, allowing for inbound upsell or cross-sell. There is also an increased ability to integrate data enrichment with Axciom. In response to the major uptick in email, the system can quickly create a new customer file or account based on the information in an incoming email. The pack also allows companies to place a large bulk order, but have the products shipped to multiple individuals. "We looked at the product from the view of the user, to enhance productivity," Leigh says. "We wanted to speed transaction time. The enhancements are based on that."