SSA Global announced that its customer Essilor has won the Gartner CRM Excellence Award 2006 for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Essilor, the world leader in the design, manufacture and customisation of corrective lenses to meet all visual requirements, implemented SSA Global's CRM, powered by Epiphany, to improve collaboration between customers, the independent Opticians and Essilor as the manufacturer. An innovative B-2-B-C loyalty program was the base of the success. Essilor's CRM implementation beat the entries of British Telecom and the Czech Bank for the award.

A review team of Gartner analysts selected the award finalists after evaluating and rating each of the initial entries based on demonstrated excellence in their CRM initiatives. Attendees at the Gartner CRM Summit decided the winner by vote after seeing each finalist's presentation.  Essilor joins Bankinter, Boise Office Solutions, GSI Commerce, Grupo Financiero Bital, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and HSBC Mexico as SSA Global customers that have received the Gartner CRM Excellence Award in the past six years.

"We are thrilled to receive this prestigious award," said Ron de Bruijn general manager of Essilor in the Benelux. "This award reflects our ongoing commitment to customer relationship management and in particular to our loyalty program." Ron de Bruijn went on to state, "since we implemented SSA CRM, we have seen a noticeable improvement in both revenue and in customer satisfaction." Compared to the competition, we grew our market share significantly.

Loyalty Lab set up the business marketing program in association with Essilor and approximately 100 independent opticians. This marketing program provides opticians the tools to maintain an optimal relationship with his customers and the information to time exactly up and cross-selling activities. "Our program has proved its added value to the optician taking part and to Essilor. This award is a big acknowledgement to our work and success", says Jasper van IJssel, program director at Loyalty Lab.

"We congratulate Essilor on receiving the 2006 Gartner CRM Excellence Award," said Gregg Monastiero, vice president CRM, SSA Global. "We are proud to be a part of Essilor's CRM initiatives as they have improved the quality of their customer relationships and subsequently of their customer profitability. Additionally, the continuing industry recognition of our clients by leading analyst firms over the past six years shows that SSA Global CRM solutions drive demonstrable business results through intelligent customer interactions."