Item: Oracle Siebel CRM
Rating: 2
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle CRM (Siebel) is being used throughout our organization for several reasons. The main use of the tool is so that our Branches and Service Center locations can manage our customer's profile, by Opportunity management (Sales), Activities for follow-ups, notifications and service requirements. We also use service requests for account negotiations, Wire/Check requests and technical support issues.

We have built an email portal to allow branch and service center associates to send email and correspondence communications to our clients as requested. Campaign is used to deliver call lists as a sales strategy.

Pros and Cons

The ability to customize the tool
The sheer magnitude of what can be done with the tool

On premise so servers must be maintained
Very heavy on the technical side
Out of box functionality isn't enough, you really need to customize the tool.

Return on Investment

Since it is our sales tool we use it for tracking, it is virtually the only thing we have for the branches and service center teams to document there leads and opportunities.
It is cheaper than Salesforce even with the 20 or so team members we have on staff.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Siebel CRM was selected 2 years before I began working here. At that time is was best of breed, and we only used it for servicing our clients. Our company did not use any of the sales features in the tool. Once the company decided to do sales, we introduced opportunity management and campaign. At that time we began to research other CRM tools, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and I believe Oracle on demand??? We already use Microsoft Dynamics in another business line of the company and we considered their newer cloud solution. The cost with Salesforce was extremely high although they did win out over the others. In the end, budgets were cut and with that cut, went the new CRM tool.

Other Software Used

IBM Campaign, IBM Marketing Operations

Likelihood to Recommend

The biggest issue with Siebel is that it isn't super user friendly, It is really heavy in technology and we have a team of over 20 people to support the tool. Because the out of box functionality did not meet our needs, we have had to customize the tool quite a bit. This leads to longer release changes. Although there is GUI now, we would have to make several updates with a java developer to get the tool to act as user friendly as possible.

Moreover, the performance in the tool is terrible. This is probably due to several factors including the customization, but if we had something that was cloud based, that could meet the ever changing business strategies on the fly with an easy interface, I believe our users would be a lot more willing to use the tool.

CRM does have its purpose though and it works for us to build the customer's profile, work account negotiation service requests and make sales calls.

Oracle Siebel is dead: just needs to be gone

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle CRM