SAN FRANCISCO, April 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com , the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Nelnet is personalizing Supportforce, the on-demand customer support solution from salesforce.com, with salesforce.com's tool for rapid and easy customization, Customforce.

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Nelnet, a user of Supportforce since April 2004, is one of 13,900 companies of all sizes that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of Jan. 31, 2005. Based in Lincoln, Neb., Nelnet, which offers a broad range of student loan and financial services and technology-based products, including student loan origination and lending, guarantee servicing, and a suite of software solutions, is leveraging the benefits of a 17th-generation CRM solution by utilizing Supportforce, as well as new innovations including Customforce.

"We knew that a traditional CRM solution wouldn't be flexible enough for the way we do business," said Ray Ciarvella, Chief Information Officer of Nelnet. "Because we're fielding a wide variety of questions from our customers, we're constantly changing the way we manage and organize cases, and the way that data is reported to other parts of the company. Supportforce lets us make those dynamic changes, no matter how we need to view the information."

Nelnet has also customized Supportforce by allowing anyone in the support organization to become a stakeholder in a particular customer case, and to search and update cases for which they're named as stakeholders. With this customized feature, Nelnet has created a "community" of people who can solve customer problems even if they're not case owners. Supportforce is also helping Nelnet reduce the administrative workload for its support staff, allowing them to handle more cases in less time.

"Because Supportforce is so user-friendly, we've seen extremely high adoption rates for the solution, even among our users who don't consider themselves technically savvy," said Ciarvella. "They've become very excited about using Supportforce to solve problems and to get closer to our customers."

With Customforce, salesforce.com provides every company the power to be unique. Representing a major breakthrough beyond cookie-cutter vertical solutions, Customforce enables ordinary business users to easily customize their CRM and create new on-demand applications through a simple point-and-click interface. Built into Salesforce and Supportforce, Customforce enables 13,900 companies to leverage the simplicity, power, and success of on demand to create 13,900 unique CRM editions. Customforce makes Salesforce the world's most customizable CRM.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM). Through its award-winning salesforce.com family of products including Salesforce (http://www.salesforce.com/ ) and Supportforce (http://www.supportforce.com/ ), the company provides a comprehensive suite of CRM applications to help enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies meet the complex challenge of sharing and managing information on-demand. Salesforce and Supportforce are built on the Sforce client/service integration platform and include the Customforce tool for complete on-demand customization. Sforce (http://www.sforce.com/ ) and Customforce (http://www.customforce.com/ ) allow customers and independent software vendors to customize and integrate salesforce.com's products, as well as build their own on-demand enterprise applications. As of January 31, 2005, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 13,900 customers and approximately 227,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com/ , or call 800-NO-SOFTWARE.

NOTE: Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of, and Sforce, Customforce.com and Supportforce.com are trademarks of, salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Jane Hynes of Salesforce.com, Inc., +1-415-901-5079, or
jhynes@salesforce.com

Web site: http://www.salesforce.com/