Siebel's eFinance 7

Siebel opened the lid on eFinance 7, an industry-tailored version of its flagship Siebel 7 CRM software. All tallied, Siebel has been offering 20 versions since last year, choosing to describe each one randomly this year. Siebel eFinance 7 is a stable of applications targeting CRM, employee relationship management, partner relationship management and analytics. Siebel eFinance 7 ships with Siebel Analytics 7, which helps companies gain a better view on what is and isn't working in their customer-facing efforts. Financial institutions such as Charles Schwab, Dresden Bank AG, FleetBoston Financial and others have chosen eFinance to help them manage sales, marketing and customer service operations. Along with staple CRM functionality, eFinance 7 has some features special to financial companies. For instance, eFinance 7 gives financial professionals a rounded view of each client's profile, including accounts, transactions, holdings and interests. Financial salespeople are armed with sales pipeline analysis reports, product encyclopedias, team-based selling views and risk assessment capabilities. Seibel eFinance 7 also features an enhanced relationship hierarchy that helps firms advise clients with complex financial holdings or across family members or multiple stakeholders. Like most industries, the financial community lives and dies on the quality or lack thereof of its customer service. Hence the need for CRM software that puts information in the hands of customer-facing employees, such as relationship managers, financial analysts, bankers, brokers, traders, service agents and call-center representatives. And it's not just about attracting and retaining customers that's important to financial firms -- but also recruiting and keeping these valuable employees. Just ask Craig Miller, senior vice president and CIO of capital management and wealth management group at First Union National Bank, a Siebel customer. "Empowering our relationship managers and financial advisors with state-of-the-art tools and information to service our clients is a top business and technology priority," said Miller, in a statement. "The combination of this application and our very talented relationship managers will differentiate our client service and allows us to attract and retain the best relationship managers, and help grow revenues." Industry-focused CRM software has become all the rage, as competition among CRM vendors heats up. Nearly every major CRM vendor from SAP to PeopleSoft and most recently Baan are tuning their offerings to vertical markets, embedding business processes unique to certain industries directly inside the software. The thinking goes that vertical flavors of enterprise-class software reduces costly and time-consuming customization efforts. Tom Kaneshige also writes for Line56.com