CUSTOMER INTERVIEW:How Kewill Uses VerticalResponse to Develop Customer Accounts

Customer: Jennifer Kidd and Debbie Ward
Title: Marketing Manager and Marketing Communications Manager
Organization: Kewill Enterprise Shipping Management
Revenues: About $82 million a year (2007)
Web:www.Kewill.com

SP: What does Kewill do?
JK: Kewill Systems, PLC is a leading provider of global solutions for the dynamic supply network. The dynamic supply network enables enhanced responsiveness to customers through flexible connectivity between partners and systems, providing improved visibility and effective compliance, bridging the gap from a traditional rigid supply chain. We’ve got over 35 years experience in the supply chain space and have implemented over 40,000 systems worldwide.

SP: Why did you select salesforce.com as your CRM solution?
DW: We formed a task force of sales, marketing, and finance to evaluate a number of solutions. We went with salesforce.com because of the flexibility of the system and the functionality. We have global offices and wanted a system that was easy to roll out worldwide. AppExchange was another factor. We liked the way that you could add functionality to the system without having to wait for salesforce.com to implement it in the main product set.

SP: What AppExchange partners are you currently using?
JK: The only AppExchange application that we’re using today is VerticalResponse for our email marketing. We have a fairly limited marketing budget, so we have to be very wise about how we spend. We therefore do a lot of email marketing to support a variety of online deliverables like white papers, case studies, and e-newsletters. We have an opt-in program for our mailing list that’s resulted in an extensive set of interested parties. VerticalReponse helps us manage our campaigns and make sure that the right information is going out at the right time.

SP: How difficult was it to bring up VerticalResponse?
DW: It was incredibly easy. I was able to download the application and get it working within an hour. In fact, I downloaded it while I was doing my investigation of which products we might consider. I did have to make a call to our system administrator to give me the privilege required to install the program, but after that, it was pretty much point and click. VerticalResponse has a 500-email free trial, so I was able to get the application up and running immediately. It was very impressive.

SP: How many people are using salesforce.com?
JK: We’ve had salesforce.com up and running since October of 2007. About 30 people in this division are already using it and we have plans to roll it out relatively soon to the other four divisions. We expect eventually somewhere around 150 users. We expect the VerticalResponse tool to be extremely popular because it provides tracking when customers click on email links, warning sales reps that a customer is interested in our products – a real aid to our sales process.

SP: Can you give me an example where VerticalResponse helped out?
DW: We recently used VerticalResponse to drive an email campaign to support our training classes. We were able to use various lists that we’d compiled, both inside salesforce.com and outside, and were able to create an email blast in less than an hour. Within seven business days the classes were full, which was a faster enrollment rate than we had experienced in the past.

SP: How has your experience been with customer support?
JK: VerticalResponse was so simple to use that we really didn’t need much support. We did call a couple of times with the kind of questions that we probably could have found in the help files. Each time, a human being picked up the phone immediately and they were very helpful. We were extremely impressed. With salesforce.com, we have email support and I’m not entirely certain how that’s been working out, since our system administrator interfaces with the salesforce.com support team. It’s my impression that it’s been OK.

SP: Do you have any plans for future AppExchange applications?
DW: We’re looking at something to help us out with our user surveys and research for our white papers. We’ll probably get an analytics package to help us understand what’s happening on our Website. We regularly check the AppExchange Website to find out what’s out there. That way we can plan for the future and understand what functionality makes sense as we go forward.