CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Paper-IV
Section-II

Case
Study Title Date Sign
No.
Effective Sales Through Sales Force
1. Automation (SFA) – Rambo
Pharmaceuticals
Leveraging Customer Feedback to
2.
Build Loyalty – Megapaths Networks
Technology as an Effective
3. Ingredient of CRM – Global
Knowledge
Increasing Customer-Centricity
4. Through Effective Life-Cycle
Management – IT-Mobile
Breathing New Life Into CRM while
5. Investing for the Future – Janus
Capital
Use of Operation Support System To
6.
Boost Sales – Teltech
Information Processing Through Web
7.
Integration – Ping’ An
Effective Sales Through Data
8.
Synchronisation Process – Samtech
 CASE STUDY NO 1

EFFECTIVE SALES THROUGH SALES FORCE AUTOMATION (SFA)

RAMBO PHARMACEUTICALS

Name of the Company: Rambo Pharmaceuticals

Type of Company: Mid sized Pharmaceuticals Company

The Business:

• From a business standpoint, a company has a series of processes designed

to complete business functions.
• Rambo pharmaceuticals Company deals in business with turnover in hundred
millions.

The Challenge:

• Limited (or few) business processes.

• No formal sales process and no library of documented practices.
• Two wings of the sales force; primary sales force and specialized sales force
making visits to same doctors to market the drugs without sharing call notes
between representatives (show lack of co-ordination).
• Large amount of data processed every month (in terabytes).
• Outdated system to analyze and process data, very few actual processes for
the delivery of processed data.
• Data extraction for data processing and analysis was difficult.
• Tremendous amounts of development backlog (90 days) were generated due
to the use of general purpose system.

The Solution:

Looking at the above challenges it is clear that this case is of Sales Force
Automation (SFA). SFA is designed to help salesperson’s acquire and retain
customers, reduce administrative time, provide robust account management thus
making salespeople and sales activity strong enough to achieve goals. It is
necessary for Rambo pharmaceuticals to focus their efforts on restructuring
many of the business processes as follows:

• Contact Management programme:

It would be of great help. Basics like name, address, phone numbers,
personal and business information, activity related to individual should be
taken up and organisational charts should be created for sales people so that
they can see whom they have to deal with at what level of hierarchy. Some
user friendly applications are available which would help in giving the sales
 people the required information in quick manner. In addition, contact
behaviour characteristics should be included so that each behaviour can be
associated with behaviour templates useful for newly joined sales people.

• Data Information System:

An up to date information system, is a must for this scenario as the salesmen
going on round must have access to the latest up to date information history
about the doctor he is visiting. Usage of mobiles devices like PDA’s, laptops
etc. should be considered for the sales teams.

• IT Based Business Applications:

The company should gradually and strategically adopt undertaking IT
technologies. It should phase-in IT-based business applications including
Knowledge Management Systems (KMS), Business Intelligence (BI),
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and so on.

• Sales Force Automation:

The company should start to operate Sales Force Automation, a business tool
to help realize the maximization of sales efficiency.

Sales power plays a crucial role in increasing the company’s revenues

particularly in the pharmaceuticals industry, and in the same way sales
person’s turnover and organizational structural changes are highly likely to
wreak havoc on the company’s overall sales performance.

In most cases, each individual of both the sales team within the company
should separately keep the information about the doctors due to the lack of
proper doctor profile management, which increases the difficulties in
executing the strategic management functionalities.

The company should start to develop and build SFA. It must form its own
task forces with internal employees from sales, marketing and planning team
and work together with CRM experts, to develop and deploy the system.

• Data Mining Techniques:

Some data mining techniques can also be now used as the amount of data we
are dealing with is huge and to reduce the time lag. Rambo pharmaceuticals
should now seamlessly extract customer and after sales data from the system
and easily capture sales information and activities by associating with internal
groupware. Development of web server applications is also necessary so
that sales workers can perform their tasks through the web including
extracting customer information, planning and scheduling customer encounter,
and providing daily sales records and information.

Managers can come up with effective sales and services strategies based
on the analyses of sales volume and reports provided by their sales person.
This will ultimately result in enhancing sales power and systemizing the
information management across the enterprise.

The company should train and educate sales persons to take full advantages
of the solution systems. It should also consider adopting Mobile CRM based
SFA technologies and features. The company should plan to build officers
linked with wires and wireless communications by combining all the IT assets
in the organization into Web-based enterprise portal.

With all these efforts, the company is now well positioned for an unparalleled
leader in the pharmaceutical industry.
 CASE STUDY NO 2

LEVERAGING CUSTOMER FEEDBACK TO BUILD LOYALTY

MEGAPATHS NETWORKS

This case study is based on a presentation by Adrienne Dale at CRM Guru’s

Annual Conference, the Customer Think Executive Summit 2003.

Name of the Company: Megapaths Networks

Type of the Company: Network Solutions

The Business Case:

MegaPath Networks delivers secure access and managed network solutions that
enable business of all sizes to cost-effectively connect branch officers, mobile
workers and home-based workers to centralized corporate resources. MegaPath
wanted to get a solid fix on customer feedback and find a way to translate it into
loyalty.

When Adrienne Dale joined the company, she brought with her a great deal of
experience about establishing a formal survey process for gaining customer
satisfaction data as well as processes for analysing and acting upon the data. As
a result, MegaPath has been able to tie customer satisfaction levels to things
such as response time to queries and number of interactions with support – then
take appropriate action.

In her previous job, Adrienne Dale worked at a company that religiously captured
customer satisfaction data but did “absolutely nothing with it,” said Dale, who is
now senior vice president at MegaPath Networks, Inc. and who brought the
lessons learned and programs established in her prior employment to her current
work environment.

Before she started at MegaPath, Dale devoted considerable effort to “marrying

the customer satisfaction data with transactions and other data that we had to
make actionable, get actionable data and get results,” Dale said. When she got
to MegaPath, the company didn’t have a format customer satisfaction program in
place, but instead got feedback from customers in a more random fashion”.
Because it was only random customers or those customers who felt so strongly
that they proactively were going to contact us, either the feedback was
diminished or it was inflated beyond its significance where we were jumping
through hoops because of what one customer thought,” she explained.

The Solution:

• Develop a Formal Customer Satisfaction Survey

 One of her first moves was to implement a formal customer satisfaction
survey program that allows the company to put the information in context so
the company response could be appropriate to the feedback. First and
foremost, she developed a survey that focused on the customers of the
company as a whole, sort of resist the pressure or we’re being seduced, and
we’re just going to survey this little bit. She needed to see how the sales
operation was doing, so I’m just going to survey the sales operations piece,
“When a customer’s giving you feedback, get the whole picture, understand
as much as you can,” she advised.

But, she cautioned, the information had to be linked up to transactions so it

has meaning and is traceable (See graphics below). Frequency of data
collection is critical, too. “Something that’s once a month just feels glacial and
if it’s slower than that, gosh…….. attain, in contrast, if you have very large
accounts with really big relationships, once a quarter, twice a year is probably
enough, and you need a little time for your changes, because you’ve got now
your ocean liner, are going to be slower”. Dale said.

Time to Resolution

Finding: Overall satisfaction generally falls as the number of interactions with

support rises.
Action: Analysing why issues remain unsolved at first and second contact;
develop training to increase early contact resolution.

Time to Resolution

100 80

90
70
80
60
70
Number of Contacts

Very Satisfied (%)

50
60

50 40

40
30
30
20
20
10
10

0 0
1 Times 2 Times 3 Times 4 Times More than 5
Times

Source: MegaPathCustomer Satisfaction Survey Number of Contacts Very Satisfied (%)

 Response Time Impact

Finding: Overall satisfaction falls as response time lengthens.

Action: Focus on response time management to drive down response time.

Response Time Impact

45 90

40 80

35 70
Number of Contacts

Very Satisfied (%)

30 60

25 50

20 40

15 30

10 20

5 10

0 0
Less than 5 5-10 minutes 11-20 minutes 21-30 minutes 31-40 minutes
minutes

Source: MegaPathCustomer Satisfaction Survey Number of Incidents Very Satisfied (%)

Dale noted that when designing a survey, a company must keep its end
objectives in mind. Really key for your designing your survey program is to
identify what are your end objectives? ”What do you want to be able to measure,
and build that in? If you haven’t designed that up front, you’re going to find
yourself frustrated. I want to answer this question but I can’t connect all the dots,
and very simple stuff, but map the data sources,” She contended. And
companies should ensure that the length and tone of a survey doesn’t turn
customers off.

It’s not just what you Do, But the Way You Do It

The mechanism, too, has an impact. Online surveys are fine though “it doesn’t
work for every industry, but when it does, it’s the best way to go. The intention is
important. How do you solicit customers to participate?” she said”. And, it
should be a very personal message over the signature of the highest level
involved executive.

Currently, MegaPath is using RightNow Technology Metrics and, Dale noted,

“There are a lot of great companies out there. This is a really cost effective way
to go”.
No matter what vendor solution is selected. Dale urged companies to look for
certain features. “You want to look for are build-it-yourself questionnaires so that
you’re not having to stand in line to get somebody to build it for you plus pay
them for it,” she said. “Online statistical and graphical reports, you should be
able to get that out of whatever product you’re using, and the ability to download
that data so you can do more with it, because you’ll find that once you get gong,
there is more you want to do”.

While granular data can let companies drill down to individual situations, it can be
overwhelming. “It’s real easy to just get lost in those details, so an important
balance is to look for patterns and rise up to say, 30,000 feet.

Analyze the Data

Once collected a company can scrimp on analysis. “You have to commit

resources to this,” said Dale. “What is the point of saying, ‘Oh our customer
satisfaction is X, or customer loyalty factor is Y,’ if you are not trying it to things
that you can then do something about”.

And Dale cautioned that CVM is “a continual thing. With any kind of satisfaction
or loyal improvement effort, it is continuous; it takes relentless effort and
sustained focus”. said Dale. “There is no joke here, it’s just a lot of hard work,
and you have to be ready for that. ‘OK, we are going to look at the data every
other week, we are going to look at the data once a week, we’re going to look at
the data every other week, we’re going to look at the data once a week, we’re
going to roll things up.’ And when these kinds of issues come to us, we need to
develop knowledge so we’re handling it better, so that regardless who fields that
call, who interacts with that customer, we’re telling them the best answer, the
best solution, the first time, that may be a knowledge issue, so if you have a
knowledge development team, that would be their baby”. Dale encouraged
companies to coach and train employees so they are all on the same page when
it comes to dealing with information and different scenarios. “What I’ve done and
at MegaPath and at companies before, is that this is something that once a
week, a group of people cross-functional looking at the data, with everyone
coming back. ‘Look here’s my action.’ And doing something where they’re putting
that into action fast enough like tomorrow or the next day, so that by the time we
meet next week or maybe if you’re in a slightly slower cycle, in two weeks, we
can see, did what you do make a difference? Do we need to fine tune it? You
know that’s why I’m talking about that rapid response, rapid action, and fast rapid
feedback so you actually can make some changes”.

Without rapid response, parts of the company can become frustrated. They will
feel “like operations is dragging down all our efforts to increase customer loyalty
and to increase our stickiness with our customers, why are they moving so slow,
so it’s a real big imperative that you are getting the data fast enough, acting fast,
and then getting that feedback on the impact of the actions that you were taking,”
she said.

Overall, though, relentless focus is critical. “It is just never ending, it can’t be OK,
this quarter we’re going to do customer satisfaction, it’s week after week, and
really, for your frontline people, it’s day after day, hour after hour. It has to be
something that’s in their brains, that constant feedback, and it’s feedback as fast
as possible, here’s what you heard, this is what customers are saying about you,
really important for people to have that”.

Sidebar: Step by Step

Turn measurement into results

1. Cost-effective and easy to use: web-based surveys

2. E-mail invitation over signature of highest-level involved executive (VP or
above)
a. Affirm commitment to customer satisfaction and ask for feedback
b. Include link to on-line survey and opt-out link.
3. Ensure completed surveys are tied to customer contact record ID for
tracking and analysis.

Establish a continuous process

1. Establish a continuous quality improvement process

2. On an on-going basis, consolidate and present current results and trends.
3. Identify correlations between satisfaction and loyalty to other factors
- Product
- Issue type
- Response time
4. Search for patterns -30,000 ft view
5. Seek actionable data- ground-level view – details.
 CASE STUDY NO 3

TECHNOLOGY AS AN EFFECTIVE INGREDIENT OF CRM

GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE

Name of the Company: Global Knowledge

Type of Company: IT Education

The Business Case:

Global Knowledge, a worldwide leader in IT education and enterprise training

solutions, needed a solid and scalable platform for delivering its virtual classroom
e-Learning training programs. The company currently offers over 700 courses in
21 countries and in 13 languages every day for such leading companies as
Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel, Oracle, Legato, Enterasys and Compaq in addition to a
broad array of industry curriculum and certifications. Over the last 2 years,
Global Knowledge has begun offering a broad menu of these classes as
instructor-led, virtual e-Learning courses but needed a technology platform to
effectively address their customers’ virtual training needs around the world.

Global Knowledge customers, located throughout the world, attend virtual

classes through various connections – dial up modem, DSL, cable modem and
corporate LANs behind firewalls. The courses are equivalent to traditional
instructor-led classroom courses – complete with subject matter experts as
instructors; live hardware and software practice labs, discussion groups and live
teacher/student interaction.

The rigorous training needs of their customers, combined with widely dispersed
geographical locations, required that Global Knowledge have a training platform
that could:
• Offer high quality Global Knowledge content and instruction consistent
with the in-class experience;
• Reduce travel time and training-related expenses;
• Eliminate the need for extra phone lines and conference call fees;
• Consistently and effectively penetrate corporate firewalls and proxy
gateways;
• Scale to support any number of students per day;
• Efficiently support, and not drain, existing network capacity; and
• Provide the highest quality classroom audio interaction between
students and instructors.

The Solution:
For Global Knowledge to provide an Effective Virtual Classroom e-Learning
platform, it should work a vendor that:
• Provides top-notch, consistent worldwide customer support;
• Showcases an immediate, real-time response rate to questions or
problems;
• Demonstrates the technical ability to scale alongside the growth of Global
Knowledge’s business.
• Is bale to effectively penetrate corporate firewalls and proxy gateways;
• Provides high-quality 2-way Voice over IP audio capabilities for student
and instructor learning and collaboration; and
• Provides an Enterprise class, high-availability delivery and support
infrastructure.

Global Knowledge should choose Interwise’s ECP (http://www.interwise.com)

because it addresses communications, collaboration and learning in a single,
integrated Web-based platform. The company should choose to use a hosted
solution, allowing it to focus on excellence of curriculum and instructional design.
Its internal infrastructure should not be affected by the change.

To offer over 700 courses in 21 countries and in 13 languages every day for
leading companies like Cisco, Microsoft etc in addition to a broad array of
industrial curriculum & certifications, a very responsive technology technical
support team along with the above mentioned characteristics of a vendor eases
the process.

To reduce the technical problem, Global Knowledge should stabilize the platform
used for its Virtual Classroom e-Learning through vendor support that assists
them in effectively penetrating corporate firewalls and maintaining system
performance levels regardless of a student’s location, various connections like
dial-up, cable, modem and firewall restrictions.

Thus Global Knowledge can allow all learners to become life-long learners,
expanding both professional and personal interest areas and knowledge bases.
 CASE STUDY NO 4

INCREASING CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY THROUGH EFFECTIVE LIFE-CYCLE

MANAGEMENT
T-MOBILE

Name of the Company: T-Mobile

Type of Company: Telecom

The Business Case:

Facing a maturing and competitive market in Europe, T-Mobile International

began to see the importance of nurturing ongoing customer relationships to
ensure higher retention rates and boost revenues. “As it is a maturing market
and saturated, we have to get our revenue growth from our current customers,
and that’s how CRM got more and more important”, Andras Kondor, Vice
President of CRM at T-Mobile International, told CustomerThink Executive
Summit attendees last November in Monterey.

T-Mobile is the second largest international mobile operator in the world with
around 50 million customers worldwide – 40 million of which are in Europe doing
business with the five operators the company manages. “They represent around
16 billion Euros or dollars revenue, so it’s quite a large company”, said Kondor.

Two years age the company had to start differentiating itself “through customer
centricity, brand and the one-company approach”, Kondor said, because “we
were beaten up by trying to differentiate in products and innovation. It didn’t
work”.

In some cases T-Mobile was more innovative than the competitors, bringing
products out two or three months before competitors but quickly found out “no
one cared”, said Kondor. “We asked the customers, and they said they don’t
choose or switch mobile operator because of product, because they assume
[competitors] either have very similar ones, or will have very similar ones, so we
found out we can’t differentiate in product”. T-Mobile also wasn’t price leader.

“So what that left are three things—customer-centricity, brand, and one
company”, said Kondor. The company set a goal to “be at the most highly
regarded service company in the industry”. They defined new brand messages,
soon to be made public”. We want to have the same brand message across the
world”, he explained. T-Mobile also wanted to bring its various European
operating companies together under one umbrella. “We believe that one
company in mobile can be the only winning strategy”.
Now the marketing directors of the different countries don’t report to their
managing directors, they report to the CMO of T-Mobile International. “It was, as
you can imagine, a difficult transition, not a very popular one”, said Kondor. “But
we believe that even large operators like Germany with something like 20 million
customers, still can’t compete alone.” Kondor works closely with these
companies regarding CRM for consumers, who make up 80 percent of T-
Mobile’s customer base. “The countries are responsible still for the
implementation”.

Seven points toward actionable customer centricity:

1. Create vision and lead toward it

“I think this is very important to have a vision”, said Kondor, particularly for an
international company with numerous units used to operating independently in
different countries. Round Ltd. helped T-Mobile develop its vision. Kondor noted
that Round’s involvement was a key because T-Mobile basically “created this
whole CRM thing, CRM department 2 years ago. There was no CRM
internationally two years ago. Part of the problem was that “senior management
thought there was no synergy, so we don’t need international CRM”, said
Kondor. “They were half right, there’s no synergy. It’s not about synergy, it’s
about direction”.

Kondor has a small team – 8 people – and rely on a lot of countries. “How can I
possible run CRM in 5 different countries?” said Kondor. “So, we focus on the
vision. And that is, I think, extremely important that to be aligned, all these 5
countries behind this vision”.

2. Plan and measure capability development

“We believe that it is only through capabilities that we can achieve our results”,
said Kondor. “These customer management capabilities are complex and
therefore, they need to be planned and measured on a regular basis”.

That means company will not focus on product or even on customer satisfaction,
but rather on customer value. Round’s methodology uses a baseball metaphor
to determine where a company is on the path to customer-centricity (first base,
second base, etc.). “T-Mobile has now set this so-called third base vision for all
its subsidiaries, and we regularly plan and measure customer management
capabilities, how they get here, because to set a vision is nice, but what is
important, that we plan and measure”, said Kondor.
3. Segment your customer base by need and value

Why are need and value so important? According to Kondor, T-Mobile had to
determine what the customer wanted so it could “know how valuable they are for
us, what we can afford”.

One of the company’s projects was segmentation because “we said we want to
go to a customer value focus, but we realized we didn’t know how valuable each
of our customers is in each country. Value doesn’t equal billed revenue. We
analyzed that billed revenue explains roughly 70% of value, which is, by far, not
good enough”.

Instead, T-Mobile was looking for “outdoing, which is billed revenue, and
terminated revenue. You know, in Europe, you don’t pay for the terminated calls,
so you don’t see it on your bill if you receive a call, so that’s an important factor”.

It was important to identify and distinguish among customer-driven costs and

company-driven costs. “The distinction is very different and very important. If you
throw out stupid things on the good customer that cost us money, we shouldn’t
disadvantage the customer before that”, said Kondor.

The company had to determine acquisition and retention costs “because we

consider them investments into the customer, because of this contract life cycle”,
said Kondor. “So, now we have for each customer a value, and then we segment
these customers, based on their value”.

While that’s a step in the right directions, T-Mobile still didn’t know what
customers want. “We know what we get out of them, but we don’t know what
they want, and then we try to implement a need-based segmentation at the
moment. What we managed to do is to look at what needs, what group of needs
the customers have on the market. We define four need segments, and we
translated them into usage. Is it right? No. That’s inherently wrong because
needs are for about future, whereas usage is about past”.

The company has CRM data for each customer in the data warehouse and
needed to say which segment they belonged to. “It’s extremely and prohibitively
expensive to do market research on each of 40 million customers”, said Kondor.
“So what we did, we went for usage. We tried to replicate usage, usage clusters.
Statistically significant usage clusters, based on voice usage, SMS usage, MMS
usage, data content usage, hand-set type, very, very sophisticated, and then we
found the need segments, and we implemented in all the countries for the need.
I’d rather call them usage, and four value segments, and they are harmonized
across the group.

4. Develop segment focus and priorities

As soon as customers are segmented, the company tried to develop segment
focus and priorities, Kondor said. The company set four value segments. “You
have to manageable”, said Kondor, noting that the company actually has 10
segments but focuses on four. “The top is the top 2%, the high is the either a 10
or 20, usually, we use 20, then the next 30% and the low is the 50% of
customers by delivering value”, he said. T-Mobile’s marketing plan, for example,
segment four low value. What do we do with that? Nothing, because segment, for
instance, is low, they’re low value, they’re trying to get rid of them, give it to the
competition”. So, while the company’s goal is to be the most highly regarded
service company, we should align service levels, based on value, and this value
segmentation is the key for that”, said Kondor. “And, also, look at customer
needs because customers have different needs in servicing them, as well”.

5. Apply customer information and segment priorities at each stage of

the contract life cycle

Kondor believes that as soon as the company has segment focus and priorities,
we should apply this information. We have the segments, we have the need and
value segments, and we set the priorities, and then apply these customer
information segment priorities at each stage of the contract life cycle.

Kondor noted that there are three questions that must be addressed in the
contract life cycle: How to manage retention, how to manage acquisition And for
me, probably the most important and mostly neglected, is how to increase the
gap between T-Mobile and its competitors”. At acquisition, we have an
advantage, we have a gap between us and the competitors because the
customer, for some reason, we sometimes don’t know, have joined us”, said
Kondor. “We are very happy that we have a gap, but then we tend to forget and
realize that at retention, here we don’t do anything basically, and then at
retention, we realize that this gap is either smaller, same or larger, and that
means that we are losing a great opportunity to manage the increase of this gap
between acquisition and retention”.

6. Align acquisition, customer life-cycle management and retention

The company then has a contract life cycle “and we should increase loyalty along
this life cycle. Then, this life cycle is our life cycle. It’s a contract life cycle. We
should look at what the customer life cycle is, like teenagers, students and so on,
and align acquisition, customer life style co-management and retention, and
manage the value of the whole customer life cycle”.

While managing contract life cycle is the “most important task” the company must
implement in the coming year, the company has to look beyond the contract as
well. T-Mobile wants “to retain the customer not only for the contract life cycle,
but longer. We’re nowhere near here, though”, said Kondor. “Our expected
customer lifetime is between 30 and 50 months, again, depending on need and
value segment”. He pointed out that South Korea telecom has had success on
building brands around customer life cycle, a best practice that Kondor called
“very interesting”.

5. Leverage the Group

Kondor noted that “there is a company contribution, how much a company

contributes to the whole, and there is a strategic importance. “Strategic
importance encompasses size and importance of market for each of T-Mobile’s
operating companies. “What we do is we don’t want to let anyone become a
black hole, that’s disastrous”, he said. “A large company with no contribution,
that’s very bad. And we don’t want to have implementers, either. We want to
have contributors and strategic leaders and common directions, shared targets
and focus areas, best practice and knowledge sharing, and involvement and co-
operation through international projects”.
 CASE STUDY NO 5

BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO CRM WHILE INVESTING FOR THE FUTURE
JANUS CAPITAL

Name of the Company: JANUS CAPITAL

Type of the Company: Financial

Business Objective:

Janus Capital Group is a global financial firm that realized customer retention is
critical to its livelihood. To diversify its product line the company went public and
formed a set of subsidiaries that ultimately need to plug into its CRM solution.
Management buy-in took some time and the job still isn’t completed, but Janus
feels it’s on the right track.

Over the past few years, the financial market has taken a huge beating as the
economy limped along. Like other financial firms, Janus knew it had to hang on
to its customers and generate new assets. While “we are always struggling on
building the lasting relationships and loyalty”, said Jon Leonard, director of
marketing at Janus, client retention became even more critical as the company
“saw the assets kind of going out the door or depleting”. And the company
realized that it was no longer good enough to be a stock picker, “because picking
high tech stocks is no longer the best thing to do these days”, said Leonard.
Instead the company needed to diversify its product offerings. “That’s why we
got into the business of bringing in subsidiaries”, he said. But that posture thrust
Janus into somewhat of a quandary. “We’ve kind of gone from very basic
products to mini products, and how to sell these products, as well as gather
information on your customers?” said Leonard.

Global sales proved to be a particularly thorny area for the company. “We can’t
afford to grow that sales force, so they need to cover a wide territory, but we
can’t hire more people”, said Leonard. “That’s been a huge challenge for us and
we’ve had to build efficiencies in. So, to track sales activities, so it’s a range of
pipeline management, all the way down to did I play golf with that customer?
What’s the customer’s wife name? There’s a lot of profiling in there to kind of
make your next visit with that customer a more personal one.

The Solution:

Segmenting its client base became a “big objective” as did efficient

communications. Leonard admits that when he signed on at Janus, there were
really no CRM objectives. “We had all these sales objectives before I inherited
this thing, which we were using and we still use, Onyx is the system, but I
inherited all of the business processes, a system that has been built and
customized through the years by IT and sales, so there were no objectives in
place from a CRM perspective to support the sales initiatives”, he said, making
things” a little bit kind of chaotic”. His first order of business was to set some
objectives and then work on getting measurable pieces against the objectives.
“Right now, it’s been an evolving process”, said Leonard.

He has put tremendous effort into educating the sales force on relationship
management, with the idea of updating CRM to the next generation then
“leverage the heck out of it to make their businesses grow, and then adoption”,
he said. “So I made my own personal objective in there, how can I get more
users to use the system, and really adopt the business processes that they have
in place and improve upon them, and thus, the next part of adoption”. Along with
that, Leonard placed a premium on more effective communication. “The effective
communication is being intelligent about who you’re sending things to, and the
reasons why you’re sending them to them, and then the outcome of that is let’s
save some money”, he said. So the company devised an e-mail strategy that
ties back to its Website. Another critical element is actionable reporting. “Some
of the units are basically taking all of the profiling information, and a lot of all of
the other kind of regular contact management information, and we’re turning
those into reports, but reports that they can take action on”, said Leonard.

“The Onyx solution has been really providing us that kind of reporting system”,
said Leonard. Users can run the reports, view them online, and then take action.
There are reports that map out and reprioritize which client’s sales reps work
with, “based on the segmentation they’ve talked about of client tiering”. And the
company has integrated ADP with internal legacy systems to build its fulfillment
engine. “We integrate with two external e-mail companies and we e-mail with
another vendor that facilitates and hosts our Janus.com website”, he said. But it
hasn’t been an easy task. It took Leonard 9 months to get an audience to listen
to his plans and “it took another 4 or 5 months to get management to bless it, so
an early buy-in is huge”, he said. And he basically played the ROI card to finally
capture the sales force’s attention. He basically pushed his way onto their radar
screen. Ultimately, he told them that their needs could not be met, explaining “I
can do whatever I wanted to this application. You guys could work within your
processes. You’re not going to get to where you need to go next year, period”,
Leonard noted. “So, that was kind of the first bullet point. No numbers involved
there. No, it’s going to call us X to upgrade, and it’s going to yield you Y on time
savings or revenue in the door, and profitability”. Janus has made great strides
but has a ways to go. Leonard keeps the communications channels open,
among other things, hosting brown bag lunches every other week to talk things
out. And he’s plotting a road map that will hopefully lead the company into the
future. “I’m kind of working on a 12 to 18 month sketch right now of where we’re
going to go”, said Leonard. “There are 3 things I’ve in my roadmap. I look at 2
quarters back, I look at 12 to 18 months forward, and then I look at what I’m
doing on an ongoing basis”. In the future, the company wants to expand its
subsidiaries and partner firms to share its client base with them. “That’s huge,
they’re working off of different systems today”, said Leonard. Janus is also
exploring how wireless technology might make it easier for them. “These highly
paid professionals, they’re using Blackberry devices now, so we are talking about
delivering a solution wirelessly to them so they can put their notes in after a
meeting and move on, so we get them off of the laptop, and onto a smaller
device, which is what they want to use”, said Leonard, who also wants to up
management involvement and usage rates.
 CASE STUDY NO 6

USE OF OPERATION SUPPORT SYSTEM TO BOOST SALES

TELTECH

Name of the Company: TelTech

Type of the Company: Telecom

Business Objective:

TelTech is a telecom company with around 16 product and service lines. The
various divisions of the company operate independently.

The Challenge:

• Maintaining decent customers service levels, due to decentralized data.

• The same decentralization of the information is affecting the sales process
also.
• Lack of standard process like billing, order management or provisioning.

The Strategy:

We consider a number of different CRM solutions to meet the company’s unique

needs and its ability to support changing needs over time.

The requirement is clear in this case, that of centralized information system or

what in the real market is known as Operations support system to provide the
necessities.

Here we can look at integrating a good Sales solution and a CRM Suite with
operations support system to enable a unified customer relationship
management and support system. The employees from different divisions
operating independently can use these solutions to manage customer account
information or whatever information that is relevant to them. The solutions can
also be used to streamline the customer newsletter process, enabling TelTech to
send newsletter electronically.

Developing these solutions will enable TelTech to automate customer support

process and streamline support operations, delivering greater customer
satisfaction and lower administrative overhead.

It would help increase the sales by maintaining systematic and organized sales
records as valuable source of information.
All the standard functions like billing, order management and provisioning will be
taken care of by these solutions, as they will be a module in themselves in these
solutions.

Key benefit areas include:

• Special Staffing costs can be avoided as it is totally software driven.

Automating responses to customer support requests will enable TelTech to
improve the effectiveness of its customer’s service department, supporting
broader business growth without the need to hire additional resources.
• Increased cross-selling revenues. Because different employees from
different departments can access detailed information about products and
services related to customer, they can respond to customer requests with
recommendations for appropriate additional products or services.
• Increased customer satisfaction.

Future Learning:

Using technology to support customer support operation will enable TelTech to

dramatically improve its service to customers – and leverage its positioning as a
telecommunications service provider that has a customer-centric view. Planning
its deployment to ensure that employees from different divisions would be
effectively trained will be the key to success of this project. TelTech should also
recognize that improving CRM and Sales functionalities is not just a one phase
process: it will need to continue to evolve its customer support and service
functions to meet changing customer needs. When selecting its CRM/Sales
solution, TelTech should focus not just on the initial project but on the solution’s
ability to grow and support changing needs over time, to leverage even more
returns in the future.
 CASE STUDY NO 7

INFORMATION PROCESSING THROUGH WEB INTEGRATION

PING’ AN

Name of the Company: Ping’ An

Type of the Company: Insurance

Business Objective:

Ping’ An is China based Insurance company offering the services to customers

that covers not just claims filling but insurance consultation, specify policy
enquiries, sales opportunities and general policy issues among other services.
Ping’ An wants to offer 24*7 services for the company.

The Solution:

The Virtual Service Factory:

In order to maintain its position long-term in the fiercely-contested insurance

market, Ping’ An should create a cross-division (among different divisions of a
branch) and cross location (among different locations) service center.

With this project, the insurance company can optimize its customer relationship
management activities, support sales and marketing processes improve cross-
selling initiatives and cut its administrative costs.

Cross-division Processing of Customer and Policy Information:

Employees at Ping’ An should be able to process customer and policy

information across divisions, with the help of heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

Web integration: Computing provides rapid relief:

Customer Relation Management (CRM) not only promises better customer

service, but also optimization of business processes, resulting in an increase in
competitiveness and in cost saving and higher earning. However, this requires
end-to-end integration of the backend systems with the CRM solution.

Ping’ An can use a Web-to-host application for this very purpose.

The software should enable the necessary integration without any modification to
the existing host application if any.
A solution where there is very low manual programming work involves. It should
be able to convert definitions and functions of the host applications automatically
into formats that support browsers.

Everything under One Interface:

Claims filling insurance consultation, specific policy inquiries, sales opportunities,

and general policy issues at Ping’ An can now be pooled at the new service
center. In order to obtain information and change data, the agent can now
access the operation host systems in the backend using the graphical web
interface of the application.

The main web-to-host application software can run in the background, ensuring
that the data entered in the front-end of the CRM system is transferred over the
secured company network to the relevant host applications, including possible
error message.

Data can be exchanged via the host adapters integrated in the application. The
service center means that Ping’ An will not only be able to improve its availability
to its customers as compared to the pre-software installation phase, but also
optimize organization significantly thanks to transparent customer histories.

We can introduce and enable even more synergy effects. Incoming e-mails and
faxes could soon be able to be processed automatically using the application
eliminating the need to distribute correspondence manually. Work can be done
on interface to data warehouse in order to extract the data obtained there to the
CRM system.
 CASE STUDY NO 8

EFFECTIVE SALES THROUGH DATA SYNCHRONISATION PROCESS

SAMTECH

Name of the Company: Samtech

Type of the Company: Computer Hardware/Software Solution

Business Objective:

Samtech is a computer hardware and software solution company that deals with
the delivery, maintenance and project customizations. They want to manage
their customer details, history and support for the customer queries. The
company wants to use IT more effectively to synchronize all their process
including the sales representatives and the technical staff.

The Solution:

Samtech is computer hardware and Software Company. It uses project

customization i.e. it enables the user to create their own environment for usage.
It is based on h/w and s/w solution. Company wants to keep customer’s details,
history and all the required stuff. Hence it has huge amount of data.

To maintain this, Company can develop a data warehouse where it can store
their huge amount of data.

Data warehouse provides an integrated and total view of other enterprise. It

makes the enterprises current and historical information easily available for
decision-making. It presents flexible and interactive information consistent. It
also makes decision-support transaction possible without hindering operational
systems. Defining features of data warehouse are: separate, subject oriented,
integrated, time variant and nonvolatile.

To synchronize all the processes, the Company can make use of Data
Synchronization Technique. It is a process if updating information among
unconnected computers like Laptop, mobile devices. This involves integration of
database maintained by different sales people & technical staff. Company uses
various mobile devices like PDA, laptops so that anyone can be in touch with
each other and company.

To provide best service to the customers it can develop a CIC (Customer

Interaction Center) where Customer can call anytime, ask queries & get them
solved without any wastage of time. Customers can also register complaints if
any which would be taken care of by the respective authorities in a timely
manner.