Salesforce.com’s Summer ‘05 Release Selected for Significant Contributions to Customer Success

Salesforce.com announced that Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has presented salesforce.com with a 2005 CRM Excellence Award for its Summer ‘05 release. Customer Interaction Solutions, a publication of Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), selected Summer ‘05 as a leading CRM solution that provides measurable business results for customers.

Customer Interaction Solutions, which covers new products and corporate developments in the customer contact center marketplace, chooses its CRM Excellence Award recipients based on customer success stories from CRM vendors. Salesforce.com was chosen for recognition based on how it effectively enabled Paymentech, one of its financial services customers, to dramatically reduce sales-lead response time from 24 hours to just two hours.

“Customer Interaction Solutions magazine implemented the CRM Excellence Awards six years ago as a way of commending companies that have proven to be true CRM partners to their customers and clients,” said Nadji Tehrani, founder and chairman of TMC. “Salesforce.com has demonstrated to the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions that its solutions have substantially improved its clients’ productivity by streamlining and facilitating the flow of information needed to retain its most precious asset: its customers.”

Prior to implementing Salesforce, Paymentech, the largest U.S.-based processor of Internet transactions, managed incoming sales leads via time- consuming faxes, making it challenging to respond in less than 24 hours. Paymentech also used the Customforce toolkit to customize its Salesforce deployment with a new Web portal for sales leads, reducing the turnaround on responses to only two hours.

“We’re extremely pleased that Customer Interaction Solutions has recognized that our Summer ‘05 release provides the most complete set of robust and flexible on-demand CRM solutions on the market today,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Paymentech’s fantastic experience with our solutions is typical of our 15,500 customers. Salesforce.com is a company that’s truly devoted to driving the utmost in customer success and satisfaction.”

Summer ‘05 is the 18th generation of salesforce.com’s industry-leading on- demand Salesforce and Supportforce CRM solutions. The Summer ‘05 product launch also includes Multiforce 1.0, the world’s first on-demand operating system, the Customforce 2.0 on-demand application customization tool and the Sforce 6.0 on-demand integration platform. Salesforce.com’s latest generation of products is an extraordinarily powerful, customizable and easy-to-integrate set of on-demand applications and application development technologies.

In the last few months, salesforce.com has been honored with the following accolades: SIIA’s 2005 Codie Awards for Best Customer Relationship Management Solution and Best Application Management Solution, ISM’s 2005 Top 15 CRM, CRMGuru.com’s 2005 Best Sales Force Automation Solution, 2004 InfoWorld 100 for IT Innovation & Resourcefulness, InfoWorld CRM Technology of the Year, Red Herring 2004 Top 100 Innovative Companies, SearchCRM SFA Technology of the Year, and Customer Interaction Solutions Product of the Year.