Advantage Software Factory, one of the leading local manufacturer of customer relationship management applications, announces the release of the first full service rental of CRM solutions in Romania. The starting version of the service is ready for SMEs, and is called AnytimeMini including the key features used by sales departments for managing sales opportunities and for customer interactions.

AnytimeMini is available starting from 20 Euros per month per user. Gradually, ASF will release the full versions equivalent to AnytimeCRM, AnytimeCRM Professional and Enterprise Edition, for rent, starting at 35 Euros per month per user.

“Renting offers the opportunity to use the key functionalities of the application rapidly, replacing the short term major financial effort with a long term minor one”, considers Marian ?tirbescu, Manager Sales&Marketing ASF.

"The flexibility in configuring the solution is another major advantage of this service. A new module, which means 10,000 Euros, can be added as an option, for 400 Euros / month. In time, the customers may decide to stop using such a module if it proves useless to the business, so the budget may be saved and used for something else. Another advantage is that annual maintenance is included in the monthly rent, so the client benefits from the latest versions of the software just by paying a monthly rent,” states the company's representative.

Stirbescu estimates 2010 revenues in excess of 50,000 EUR from rental services for SMBs, representing approximately 15% of all sales. The ASF’s Manager includes among potential clients the consulting services companies, service providers, manufacturing and distribution companies.

By the end of the 2010’s first quarter, the company will release the rental services for large companies, as well. This type of companies has been reluctant to the on demand software model so far, for security and confidentiality reasons. In order to solve this problem, Advantage Software Factory will provide the possibility for the companies to run the software on their infrastructure, in their own data room.

“Thus, the customer will be able to enjoy all the benefits of the classic model of software acquisition and will pay much less per month, about the 25^th part of the initial investment value,” concluded Marian ?tirbescu.

Advantage Software Factory is one of the few Romanian companies that makes software and IT solutions tailored to the economic crisis, generating business growth. Furthermore, at the end of last year, AnytimeCRM applications have undergone major changes in functionalities; new modules have been developed, matching the clients’ needs during this period.

Due to the economic crisis, the number of foreclosure files opened for bad loans has grown at an alarming rate, to more than 500,000. Furthermore, the crush of the real estate market has made it difficult for bank agents to recover loans granted to individuals and companies. On the other hand, town halls all around the country have filed hundreds of thousands of enforcement actions for failure of individuals and trade companies to pay fines and taxes.

In this context, Advantage Software Factory (ASF), a company that specialises in overdue debt collection applications and CRM, launches a software application intended to manage large volumes of files and to automate foreclosure proceedings.

The application allows the automatic assignment of files to agents, the identification, evaluation and capitalisation of collaterals, and contains a module for managing salary and bank accounts levies. The software generates letters, communications, notices to the client and to various institutions participating to the foreclosure procedures, automatically, and makes a history of performed operations.

Users shall be provided with a record of published auction ads and shall benefit of a series of reports on cases, by status, on recovered amounts grouped by execution phases and monthly comparative performance summaries, by recovered amounts.

“Although it facilitates an undesired activity, it is a product that minimizes the efforts of more than 500 bank agents, plus thousands of public administration clerks. Three banks in Romania have already shown interest in purchasing this software”, the Sales&Marketing Manager of ASF, Marian Stirbescu, stated.

The foreclosure management software shall be sold as an individual product, but also as an attachment to the Capone debt collection application, which generates more than half of Advantage Software Factory’s turnover. Capone is the leader in the banking field, by more than 50% of collection systems implemented with banks.

Advantage Software Factory was present as an exhibitor and partner at the first credit and collection conference organized by Expo Media in December 2009.
At this conference, some of the most important collection agencies in Romania have participated, as well as international solution providers for debt collection software. ASF featured Capone Debt Collection Software, the number one collection software in Romania.
This was a good opportunity for ASF to launch the Forced Execution Module officially, as an addition to the already existing key features for collection activities in Capone Debt Collection Software.

Although they have implemented IT solutions for customer relationship management, more than 50% of the Romanian companies, with over 100 clients, do not use the management features of requests, offers and orders from their customers effectively.

This is the conclusion of a recent study, made by Advantage Software Factory, among approximately 100 key companies of the Financial and Banking, Real Estate, IT and Telecommunications and Consulting Services. However, over 90% of the companies keep complete information about customers, including interactions with them, in such applications.

The same study reveals that the least used CRM functionality is the approval flow for offers deviation. Only 9% of the surveyed companies use a transparent approval flow of the customized offers. It seems that for the rest of the companies, offers to certain customers are made almost secretly, based on discussions, most of them informal, between the sales representatives and the director of sales. The immediate disadvantage of this practice and of not using this feature is the impossibility to create knowhow about non-typical or personalized offers, at department level, thus keeping this experience only to managers or senior vendors’ level. Basically, it obstructs the possibility of standardization of the process for personalized or sensitive offers.

The module dedicated to marketing campaign management is used by 20% of the companies; it is an essential component for marketing departments, which offers the possibility to administrate a campaign and decide on targeted customers. The first conclusion to the absence of a marketing campaign management is an unproductive marketing campaign, in which almost all clients receive the same promotion, although only 10% of them could be interested in it.

Among the important but not sufficiently used functionalities, with only 35% of users, is the CRM module that supports inter-departmental communication (sales - marketing - technical support), with effect in enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Effective use of these features would allow sales representatives to have detailed knowledge about the problems and customers issues signalled to the technical department, which affect future sales, in a positive or negative way. Moreover, if companies have different sales teams, which are responsible for different groups of products, the management of the same customer relationship should be transparent to all sales people.

On the contrary, data collection about customers, tracking sales process (sales pipeline) or running available sales reports have a 100% usage.

"Although the CRM application modules facilitate decision making on a much wider area, such as forecasting sales in the next period, the analysis of the sales force or customer relationship management efficiency, Romanian companies are still not familiar with looking at the CRM application as a "one-stop-database" from which all hierarchical levels and business departments will benefit, by extracting information. Salespeople and technical support have not understood yet that CRM is not a form of monitoring daily activities by their superiors, but rather a tool by which they can manage their business themselves, more efficiently. On the other hand, the managers have not yet reached the level to use CRM functionalities in order to extract those data that help to analyze the relationship with customers better," said Marian ?tirbescu, Sales & Mkt Manager Advantage Software Factory.

Advantage Software Factory is a Romanian company with an experience of about 5 years on the Romanian market of CRM; the company provides consulting services and implementation of their own solutions, AnytimeCRM.