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Salesforce.com Helps Muzak Tune In To CRM Success for 400 Subscribers

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — October 18, 2004 — Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Muzak LLC has rolled out salesforce.com to 400 users nationwide. Muzak selected salesforce.com in January 2004 to replace dozens of systems representing nearly a decade of corporate consolidation. Salesforce.com was also the only CRM that could be quickly integrated with Muzak's own billing system. With salesforce.com, Muzak has been able to increase the productivity and consistency of its sales organizations, while improving service levels to both new customers and existing accounts.

Muzak is one of the 12,000 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of September 30, 2004.

"Muzak is heard by about 100 million people every day at more 350,000 client locations — Cingular, McDonald's and Barnes & Noble to name a few," said Muzak CEO Lon Otremba. "Salesforce.com provides us with a common platform and a set of standard processes to manage this customer base. We can hold a crystal clear mirror up to our sales activity so that we can understand our opportunities and challenges and ensure that each customer has a fantastic Muzak experience."

The world's leading music, messaging and sound systems provider, Muzak was also the very first franchise business created in the United States. Many of the most successful broadcast companies — including ClearChannel (NYSE: CCU) and Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) — started out as Muzak franchises. Historically, the franchises drove most of the economic activity for the company. However, this model flipped in the 1990's. Muzak's corporate division began acquiring and consolidating franchises, assuming prime responsibility for generating revenue as it began a major rebranding effort to modernize the company and offering.

When Otremba became CEO in 2003, a wide variety of contact management systems remained in place at Muzak's former franchises, hindering the company's ability to get a true nationwide picture of its business. Having used salesforce.com in his previous role as executive vice president of America Online's Interactive Marketing Group, Otremba immediately recognized the need for a consistent technology to tie together the dispersed sales and support organizations in a single common system.

After evaluating a full range of on premise and on-demand CRM systems, Muzak selected salesforce.com in January 2004. Otremba said: "The reasons I chose salesforce.com for Muzak were the reasons I chose it for AOL: full customization and integration, implementation speed and success."

Muzak opted for a staged salesforce.com implementation to drive adoption from upper management through sales. Implementation also included integration of salesforce.com with a specialized billing system that was used to track client service rollouts and implementations. Current and historical transactional and customer service data is now available on-demand through salesforce.com's secure, intuitive user interface.

With salesforce.com providing a common CRM infrastructure, Muzak has gained consistent reporting and new visibility across its expanded corporate operations. Collaboration and productivity have improved. Particularly of note to Otremba, management and employees work seamlessly on existing accounts as part of an initiative to improve service to existing customers across all markets, in addition to pursuing new opportunities and sales.

"The consistency that salesforce.com provides is very rewarding," said Otremba. "The key is taking the consistency and digging deep to extract value. CRM success is a matter of moving our business forward — and this is what we are getting with salesforce.com."