manage relationships

By lan Noble
News Reporter

RELATIONSHIPS must be nur-
tured.

For businesses, that means good customer
support, knowledge of a customer's buying
history and focused marketing efforts that
leave as little to chance as possible.

A North Vancouver company is trying to
help companies achieve those objectives and
find, gain, and retain customers.

The Esplanade-based company is called
Pivotal. It’s marketing a customer-interaction
software package dubbed Pivotal Relationship
that is already turning heads in the industry.

Pivotal marketing director Sharka Stuyt said
the product is basically a database of informa:
tion about customers.

“The real purpose of the software is to help
companies better manage their relationships
with customers, from a marketing standpoint,
a sales standpoint and customer service and
support,” said Stuyt,

Previously, software helped customers keep
track of names and basic information, like a
electronic Rolodex, said Stuyt.

But Pivotal says its programs provides
everything a company needs in one integrated
system: marketing campaigns, lead tracking,
telemarketing, team selling, sales forecasting,
product files, order processing, warranty track-
ing, after-sales customer support and sophisti-
cated analysis of customer trends.

The system, said Stuyt, is adaptable to each
company and sales person, The software helps

cople in different areas in the same company
keep in couch with what’s going on with the
company’s customers,

That way, employees not well-versed in a
particular customer can search the database

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and receive timely information on the cus-
tomer’s needs and previous buying patterns to
serve the customer better

“It'll capture any touch point that anyone
in your company has with that customer,” she
said.

The software product caught the attention
of Information Systems Marketing Inc., a com-
pany Pivotal calls the premiec consulting firn:
in the area of sales, customer care and market-
ing automation.

The system’s marketing firm tested 500
similar products and awarded Pivotal with a
top 15 designation.

The company goes back to 1991, when
company co-founders Keith Wales and Norm
Francis used their more-than 35 years in the
software industry to launch software programs
for mobile computers such as the Newton
made by Apple, said Sruyt.

The company then turned its attention to
the more popular PC and laptop market.

After 18 months of developing Pivotal
Relationship for the PC, the company
launched the product it bills as the first anpli-
cation on the market to fully integrate
Microsof& Windows NT and Windows 95
desktop and notebook computer with
Microsoft BackOffice database servers,

With the release of Pivotal Relationship,
Pivotal has opened an office in New York and
partnered with a Tokyo-based firm to launch 2
Japanese version of Pivotal.

Japan is the second largest growth market
in the world for the Microsoft BackOffice plat-
form, said Stuyt.

Since July of 1995, Pivotal has added 35
staff members to bring it to its current total of
50. And the company is still hiring, Sruyt said.

Fortunately, the company knows where to
look when it’s trying to manage growth and
keep its customers happy.

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Sunday, December 15, 1996 — North Shore News — 39

PIVOTAL marketing director Sharka Stuyt lauds her
North Vancouver firm’s business-building software,
which was launched eight months ago.

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