Business Objects has announced the creation of a strategic alliance with British Telecommunications (BT) to deliver customer relationship management (CRM) solutions combined with its business intelligence (BI) offering. This partnership offers companies the benefit of improved information access and analysis, enabling them to understand and better manage all aspects of their customer-facing activities.
This new partnership marks BT`s entry into the rapidly growing business intelligence market. The combination of BT`s CRM expertise and BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence analytic application will enable the delivery of end-to-end CRM solutions for businesses worldwide.
Working with BT and Business Objects, organisations can identify their best customers, understand their behaviour and anticipate their needs at any particular moment. This enables businesses to create the best possible customer experience at every point of contact, which will help to reduce customer churn and increase customer satisfaction.
Craig Anderson, general manager BT eCRM Solutions, said: "Businesses demand highly sophisticated customer intelligence capabilities and through this new partnership, BT is now able to deliver this requirement to our customers who are looking to make the most out of their CRM investment. We can provide them with any aspect of a CRM solution from basic contact centre services to enterprise-wide customer intelligence. We selected Business Objects as a partner because they are acknowledged by our customers and industry peers as providing best-of-breed solutions."
Gary Lawrence, Country Manager at Business Objects South Africa, said: "BT`s decision to partner with Business Objects is testament to our leadership in providing innovative business intelligence solutions that meet complex business needs and deliver fast return on investment. BT`s wealth of experience in CRM, combined with BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence analytics, will enable BT`s customers to understand and improve their customer relationships better than ever before."
BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence analytic application is composed of a series of pre-packaged analytic software modules:
* Contact centre analytics - helping businesses manage their contact centres to maintain service levels while controlling costs.
* Customer analytics - helping businesses understand what drives customer behaviour and loyalty.
* Sales analytics - helping businesses understand and improve the performance of their sales force, revenues and pipeline.
* Campaign analytics - enabling businesses to analyse and maximise the performance of marketing campaigns.
BT will also work with Business Objects to tailor its customer intelligence analytics specifically for BT`s CRM customers` requirements. BT`s market knowledge combined with the flexibility of Business Objects` packaged analytics will enable fast industry specific customisation. Solutions will initially be targeted at the finance and insurance markets, as well as the government sector, through a series of joint marketing and sales initiatives.
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BT is one of the world`s leading providers of telecommunications services and one of the largest private sector companies in Europe. Its principal activities include local, long distance and international telecommunications services, Internet and broadband services and IT solutions. In the UK, BT serves more than 28 million exchange lines as well as providing network services to other licensed operators.
BT Group consists of:
* BT Retail, the UK`s largest communications service provider and the prime channel to market for BT`s other businesses;
* BT Wholesale, the provider of network services and solutions to communications companies, network operators and service providers;
* BT Ignite, BT`s business services and solutions business, serving customers worldwide; and
* BT Openworld, a mass-market narrow and broadband Internet business.
Further businesses make up BT Group, including BTexact Technologies, the internationally renowned advanced research and technology business.
In the year to 31 March 2002, BT`s group turnover was lb18,447 million with profit before taxation of lb1,273 million.
For more information, visit www.btplc.com.
Business Objects
Business Objects Products include data integration tools, the industry`s leading integrated business intelligence platform, and a suite of enterprise analytic applications. Business Objects is the first to offer a complete BI solution that is composed of best-of-breed components, giving organisations the means to deploy end-to-end business intelligence to the enterprise, from data extraction to analytic applications. Business Objects has more than 16 000 customers in over 80 countries. The company`s stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbols NASDAQ: BOBJ and Euronext Paris (Euroclear code 12074). It is included in the SBF 120 and IT CAC 50 French stock market indexes. Visit www.businessobjects.com for more information.
The company has achieved many accolades over the past months including being positioned in the Leader quadrant in Gartner`s Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBIS) Magic Quadrant; positioned as the fastest growing of the top five business intelligence vendors by International Data Corp Annual Market Report; the Software 500; KM World`s 100; Companies that Matter; best in business intelligence in the query, reporting and analysis tools category winner of the Intelligent Enterprise 2002 Readers`Choice Award; Business 2.0`s Fastest Growing Tech Companies; the Red Herring 100; and the BusinessWeek IT 200.
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