With 600 branch offices nationwide using a variety of customer relationship management systems, Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp. decided earlier this year to move to a standardized hosted CRM vendor. The goal: drastically streamline and boost its mortgage sales operations.
After reviewing several products, the Houston-based company is now deploying 2,000 seats of out-of-the-box hosted CRM applications from Entellium Corp. in Seattle. It expects deployment to be completed by the end of the year and plans to add another 3,000 seats down the road under the three-year deal.
The first 2,000 seats will be deployed in about 150 branch offices that have not produced as much business as their more successful counterparts, said David Langston, CIO of Allied. "We will target marginally producing branches first to see if it makes them more profitable," he said.
The company based much of its previous CRM system on GoldMine software from FrontPage Solutions USA Inc. but wanted new tools that allow improved sales with existing customers, he said. The Entellium CRM applications will allow customercentric communications such as birthday cards and other mailing programs to be generated automatically, Langston said.
"We don"t have a tool that lets [Allied workers] do that now," he said, noting that referral-based business is very important and can help Allied bring in new customers. "They"ve got family, they"ve got friends. It"s going to be pretty compelling to the branches."
Another shortcoming of the company"s existing CRM system is that many branches have had to devise their own customized tools -- or do without if they didn"t have the technical skills to create them, he said. As part of the deal, Entellium will provide customizations later for branch offices that want them, he said.
Allied looked at several other products, including Best Software Inc."s SalesLogix and applications from Salesforce.com Inc., before choosing Entellium. It also considered the latest GoldMine offerings before deciding to switch, he said.
"The Entellium product off the shelf is very intuitive, easy to navigate and very easy for our users to learn," Langston said. "That was a big factor."
The company even considered building its own CRM application from scratch but decided not to tie up its 16-member IT staff with that particular job. "As CIO, I"m not really reluctant to take on that kind of challenge, but if it"s not necessary to burden our staff with it" then going with an established hosted vendor is a better choice.
No price tag for the deal has been announced. Entellium"s 2-Module Suite, which includes Entellium eSalesForce and eCustomerCenter modules, starts at US$59 a month per seat.
Liz Herbert, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said the 5,000-seat Allied deal is a large one in the hosted CRM marketplace, where the industry average is for 20 such seats. "The only other company that"s been announcing deals of this size is Salesforce.com.
"They"re very focused on usability and user experience for customers," she said of Entellium. "It sounds like that was one of the reasons they won."
Entellium"s offerings are also "priced very attractively compared to other vendors in the market," she said.