For its part, Neocase, a veteran in the European market, made a strategic decision to align itself with Microsoft as a starting point to enter the U.S. market.
Rebecca Wetteman, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, called it a great lead generation strategy for a company just entering the United States. Microsoft uses a channel strategy rather than a direct sales strategy to sell its SaaS model of CRM 3.0, which Neocase can use to reduce its own marketing costs.
According to Neocase CEO Herve Pluche, his company has already signed on seven major Microsoft VARs to co-sell Microsoft, Neocase CRM solutions.
Neocase Version 10 can be integrated into Microsoft CRM 3.0 with the same look and feel on the front end, and at the back end, it can use the same database.
More importantly, Neocase will supplement what Pluche called Microsoft's "very basic customer service" component with its own robust capabilities.
According to Wetteman, Neocase has deep domain expertise and features, such as parallel processing in order to handle a collaboration between multiple departments, that are beyond what Microsoft's CRM 3.0 can do.
Cellular customers whose service is down, for example, want the service back up but don't want to pay for the three days of down time.
The application can initiate processes with technical support and the billing department simultaneously. Pluche calls this child-case technology.
"One case is a clone of the initial case. Both cases are alive and sent to different organizations. At the back end it reassembles the puzzle and delivers a complete answer," Pluche said.
Although Microsoft's customer service module can create a snapshot, like a child case, it is inert and does not trigger a process, Pluche said.
The application also uses what Pluche calls a parent case. In a parent case, a CSR (customer service representative) can tag certain similar calls that may represent a global problem and send them to a single case file for any CSR to access.
As a stand-alone package application, Neocase Version 10 will be priced at US$2,000 per seat for 50 seats. As a SaaS solution, it will be less than $100 per month, per user.