BT Drives Tailored Approach to SME Customer Management

The UK's small businesses now have a greater choice of ways to manage their customer relationships, thanks to a partnership between BT Business and salesforce.com, the market leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

BT Business will resell salesforce.com's flagship Salesforce CRM application which has revolutionised the way businesses manage and share information – utilising the collaborative power of the internet. This agreement extends the benefits of salesforce.com's market-leading CRM solution to even more small and medium-sized businesses in the UK.

Salesforce CRM will allow BT Business' customers to manage their client relationships more effectively and gain a clearer insight into their business processes and without the prohibitive costs and management of installed, on-premise software. Recent research by BT Business, revealed that client relationships is the area that UK SMEs believe is the most critical factor (43 per cent) to their success.

Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, said: "Clients are the lifeblood of any business, so managing these relationships effectively is crucial. With this announcement we are continuing to change the way small and medium-sized businesses can think about and buy their business applications, delivering to them the benefits of services previously available only to larger companies."

Lindsey Armstrong, president of Europe, Middle East and Africa for salesforce.com, said: "Small businesses are hugely innovative and they need business tools that enable them to be flexible and agile and punch above their weight. Salesforce CRM will help the thousands of BT businesses looking to manage their business using on demand services.

"The SaaS model means they will not be hindered by infrastructure costs or risks associated with on-premise software. This signals the start of a new era of success for SMEs and the end of software."