Standard Bank of South Africa has been voted as the overall winner at the CRM Excellence Awards at Gartner's (News - Alert) CRM Summit in London.

 

The Gartner CRM Excellence Awards are "designed to highlight world-class CRM initiatives," according to officials at Graham Technology (News - Alert), the bank's technology vendor.

 

The Standard Bank Group is the largest South African banking group ranked by assets and earnings. Graham Technology's customer interaction platform, ciboodle, is the technology behind the bank's customer experience initiative.

 

Rolf Eich Weber, director, customer experience at Standard Bank, said the deployment of ciboodle has brought "significant improvements" in such areas as "customer experience, business efficiency, technology optimization and flexibility."

 

"It's always a rewarding experience when one of our customers is recognized for their achievements in CRM, especially at a major event like the Gartner CRM Summit," said Mike Hughes, Managing Director, Graham Technology. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Graham Technology has customers in twelve countries.

 

Earlier this month officials from Glasgow-based Graham Technology announced that the firm is working with a UK-based customer management outsourcer, Ventura, which has chosen Graham's customer interaction platform, ciboodle, to "add features and benefits to its current service offering."

 

Ventura provides CRM, collections and back office outsourcing products. The company employs 11,000 staff across seven UK sites and one in India. Its 25-strong client portfolio includes such organizations as O2, DWP, Sky and Next Directory.

 

Ciboodle will give Ventura the ability to offer its clients "the product's broad array of process-driven customer interaction capabilities," according to Graham officials: "With a set of contact center-specific features, ciboodle provides an alternative to the rigid CRM and telephony software packages in today's call centers."

 

Alan Linter, Business Solutions Director, Ventura, said the vendor chose ciboodle for its "process focus," and because of "its multi-channel capabilities. In terms of both speed and cost, we see tremendous value in being able to offer such an advanced product to our client base."

 

At the end of February Graham announced that its customer, South African energy giant Eskom, has won the Gold Award for the Middle East and Africa region at the International BPM Awards and Technology Showcase in Nashville.

 

Eskom, South Africa's state-owned electricity company is the seventh largest utility in the world in terms of generation capacity, and ninth in terms of sales.