When Veolia Environmental Services opted for a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, speed of implementation and user-friendliness were of the essence.

As William Payne, chief information officer at Veolia, explains, two previous CRM implementations – both undertaken before he arrived at the firm – had been beset by problems. Project creep and a tendency to integrate the system with all existing applications “had resulted in a technological quagmire”, he says.

The business needed a more effective system to manage interactions with its 70,000 customers and to provide staff with a simple and consistent method to log calls and highlight any actions that were needed.

“The business also wanted the application to be delivered quickly,” says Payne.

In opting for CRM, Force.com and Mobile applications from software-as-a-service (SaaS) pioneer Salesforce.com, Payne believed he could bypass the traditional pain of long implementation cycles. SaaS is often regarded as synonymous with cloud computing, as the concept is based on delivering standard applications to multiple users via the internet.

As a further benefit, the usability of the applications meant staff were also able to get up and running at a lightning pace. “More than anything, the benefit of SaaS ticks the usability box as an awful lot of people are using a similar application, so there is lots of input into how it’s used so it continues to improve,” he says.

The original implementation for 130 users was completed in a few months in 2006, but such is its success that use has continued to expand. Veolia now has 300 staff using the system.

“We are also deploying the mobile technology based on digital pens to capture information, and are currently working on the business case to expand use of the product across much of the business to give a single view of the customer,” says Payne.

Furthermore, after the success of SaaS for CRM, the business chose a SaaS application to capture health and safety information.

“We have proven the case for SaaS to the business. There is not necessarily much difference in cost between a traditional client/server model where you pay up front and the application depreciates and SaaS where you pay annually for the ability of other people to develop the product. It’s horses for courses and we use a mixture of both models,” says Payne.

But he likes the speed of implementation and usability of SaaS, as well as the fact that its relevance can easily be conveyed to the business, whereas a client/server model requires discussions about cost and timing of upgrades.

“You don’t have to talk about servers and switches and the need for spending money to support a particular functionality to support a process. With SaaS, functionality is taken care of,” he says.