Commence Wins 2003 ISM Award

Oakhurst, NJ (March 25, 2003) - Commence Corporation, a leading provider of business solutions for small to mid-size businesses (SMBs), is making significant in-roads in the Customer Relationship Management sector. The company's new suite of business applications is receiving high marks from customers and industry analysts and has just won ISM's Honourable Mention Award for 2003. The award honours the top products in the CRM industry, with more than 80 different vendors reviewed.

The Commence Application Suite features a powerful account management database with an integrated suite of pre-built, customisable applications that support a broad range of business applications - including sales force automation, marketing campaign automation, customer service, contact management and help desk initiatives - at an affordable price.

"Customers are beginning to turn their attention away from costly, complex solutions to ones that are easier to deploy, easy to use and provide a rapid return on their investments," said Larry Caretsky, the company's president. "Commence is that solution. The products' rapid implementation and user friendliness gets users on board quickly and easily - a key to any successful CRM implementation," he concluded. 

Commence provides an easy way to access and manage all types of customer data and interactions. The products user interface is designed to make it easy for businesses to access and view information, and extend the CRM database to remote user, departments, and functions throughout the organisation. A personalised "digital dashboard" enables users to pull specific details from the shared Commence database, and create custom views with information about daily sales orders, priority support calls, account history, follow-up activity, and more.

 Commence is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook, supporting group scheduling, as well as calendar and address book sharing. The solution also provides the capability to seamlessly synchronize information between desktops, laptops, and handheld devices, including the Palm Pilot.

Commence is also designed to more closely align customer support activities with an organisation's sales and marketing operations. Users can leverage contact information and other details stored in the Commence database to create intelligent marketing and sales campaigns, manage telemarketing leads, and automate various direct mail and other initiatives.

Commence fills the void in the CRM market for an affordable, ready-to-use solutions that enables SMB's to support a broad range of business functions.