AEROSPACE
Cray Deploys Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com, the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. is consolidating functions from multiple, disparate sources into a single Salesforce solution. Cray easily customized Salesforce SFA and Salesforce Service and Support with the Salesforce AppExchange platform to support its sales, service and support needs, as well as track system configurations and quality assurance metrics. Cray is one of the 20,500 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of January 31, 2006. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.
Using the AppExchange platform, Cray was able to unite many of its on-demand applications with a single data model, single security model and a single user interface. With AppExchange, Cray's employees were able to customize, build, run and share on-demand applications that power their business needs.
"Superior and customized customer support sets Cray apart. However, we had amassed multiple packaged and homegrown applications that didn't interoperate well together," said Chuck Morreale, vice president of Customer Support, Cray. "When we made the decision to move to a single application, we selected salesforce.com because we felt it would allow us to centralize all our service operations with little IT support."
Cray is using Salesforce Service & Support for a broad array of service functions, including customer self-service, Web-to-case and call tracking in the call center, as well as tracking and measuring service issues to continually provide feedback to its product teams. The self-service application has been particularly successful, enabling Cray to provide faster issue resolution without involving a support agent. Combined with Web-to-case, which allows customers to submit their own service request, the self-service application has enabled Cray to decrease the time to enter a call by five to ten times with no additional support.
"AppExchange platform has allowed us to customize our Salesforce applications and configure the system to our very specific service and support needs," said Dan Shaw, manager of Technical Training and Operations Support, Cray. "The result is that we have a global application that makes information available across organizations and allows us to escalate cases easily. This is something we never were able to achieve with our previous application, even after months of work."
"The ease of customization with Salesforce has been a great benefit to us, both in terms of getting the unique features we need and the ability to make changes ourselves without costly system integrator support," added Morreale.