Tom Siebel: Paid to be paranoid
Published: 22 May 2002 13:12 BST
What do you consider "moving in a big way?"
The average private investment in software has increased by 19 percent a year for the last 30 years, so I would say something 20 percent or greater. This would define returning to normalcy.
Another problem for the software industry is a loss of confidence that products work as advertised. What does the software industry need to do to ensure the quality and usefulness of its products?
I think it's absolutely imperative that for software application companies to be successful, they have to deliver exceptionally high-quality, high-performance products that meet or exceed the company's own expectations and, more importantly, meet or exceed the customer's expectations. I think we have many, many examples in the software industry of enterprise application software companies disappointing the marketplace.
What is the trouble then?
Companies are releasing products that don't work well. And there are companies that have very, very well-established track records now over many, many years of doing that.
Yet lately, CRM software is getting a bad rap. Recent studies show that a large number of CRM projects fail to deliver on their goals, and dissatisfaction with the technology runs high within executive ranks. Is this another case of reality not living up to expectations?
This is not lately. These problems go back to 1990. CRM projects have historically been enormously unsuccessful, as have many enterprise resource management projects and human resources projects and manufacturing projects. With that being said, you'll find that there are statistics cited, frequently cited, about CRM projects that fail. However, you will not find this in the Siebel installed base. In the Siebel installed base, we have achieved the highest levels of customer satisfaction in the information technology industry.
How do you measure customer satisfaction?
We have an outside audit firm by the name of Satmetrix, and they audit our customer satisfaction levels four times a year. What we're always looking for are areas of improvement, and there are always areas for improvement. And they measure the quality of our products, our services, our contract vehicles, our pricing, our service responsiveness.
What is your relationship with Satmetrix? Are they completely independent of Siebel?
We took an equity interest in that company a couple of years ago. We have no board representation, no regular communication. We do have a small investment in it, that's true. It's a great company. But we've invested in lots of companies.
So nearly half of all CRM projects fail to meet expectations. Siebel has more CRM customers than any other software company, and you're saying none of your customers are in that camp?
I believe you cannot find a Siebel project that does not perceive itself as being successful. I do not believe you can find a Siebel customer that has switched to another CRM vendor. There are many examples of the reverse of that, where people have switched to Siebel.
We reported in April that Siebel had instituted a group to help customers that may not be getting the bang for their buck. What are you doing with these customers?
What we have is a red account list where there are red flags in an account, things that we're concerned about. And by the way, with projects of this size -- and these are incredibly large information technology projects -- there are always problems 100 percent of the time. But the difference between us and the other software vendors is not how frequently we encounter problems; it's what we do when we encounter one.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
47 out of 88 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
