CRM - October 2008 - (Page 43)

THE NEXT ACT! FOR AN ACQUISITION When a small, family-owned company is scooped up by a bigger one, retaining proprietary customer information is crucial; well-managed opportunity data is even more important. UCSC, a roofing and insulation manufacturer and supplier in Phoenix, was recently acquired by polyurethane systems provider Bayer-BaySystems. In addition to its expertise in spray wall-foam insulation, UCSC also brought along a valuable customer management system—something it didn’t always have. Before opting for Sage Software’s Act!, UCSC had its customer data and lead information scattered across spreadsheets and paper files. If a salesperson left the company, the employee’s client information would go, too. There was no formal tracking system and no higher view of the sales cycle. The initial implementation of Act!, three years ago, delivered payback in the tracking of marketing campaigns, but later, with more emphasis on pursuing sales opportunities, UCSC began to see tremendous return on investment (ROI)—enough to earn the 2008 Nucleus Research ROI award. Bayer is now on its fourth upgrade, with Act! unifying all customer information, and has been able to start analyzing how long opportunity information was in the cycle. That gave management some visibility in monitoring the performance of its sales force. In the three years since deployment, sales have doubled. UCSC calculates that the data loss cost an estimated $1.8 million in missed sales each year. Now, its sales processes are a strength for the organization, rather than a weakness. “It’s the reason we were acquired by Bayer,” says Stephanie Gssime, who was marketing manager of UCSC and now of Bayer-BaySystems. “[Act!] helped us to follow opportunities and drive sales. We have a very locked-down lead administration and inside sales team.” —Lauren McKay Data loss meant an estimated $1.8 million in missed sales each year. s companies begin planning for the holiday season, they can’t afford to overlook customer service. Any rise in the number of purchases—which, after all, is the goal of most businesses—will almost certainly lead to a proportional rise in post-holiday calls to contact centers, each of them expecting a quick answer. Instead of standing under the mistletoe blithely waiting to be kissed by the miraculous gift of quality customer experience, Reynoldsburg, Ohio– based Bath & Body Works, a division of Limited Brands, took preemptive action. Operating more than 1,600 retail stores, the beauty and personal-care specialist’s goal was to provide its contact center agents, Web-site visitors, and store associates with access to details about all of its 10,000 products. According to Pati Crowley, B&BW’s director of customer experience, the existing knowledge management (KM) system wasn’t agile enough to handle the winter-season holiday crunch. “The system was clunky,” she admits, adding that the system delivered too much information at once for agents to try and sift through while trying to solve a caller’s issue.“From an accessibility perspective, we couldn’t get to the [correct] information at the right point of interaction with our customers,” she says. Crowley says it was important that any new KM system offer a quick implementation and seamless integration. A Bearing this in mind, B&BW decided to turn to contact center software provider Astute Solutions—again. (The retailer was already using Astute’s ePowerCenter customer interaction and relationship management solution.) Building on familiarity, B&BW integrated Astute’s RealDialog and RealDialog Agent Assist to streamline the voluminous information agents had to access in order to provide targ e te d a n s we r s quickly. “Not only was [RealDialog] a best-in-class solution, but it also integrated directly into our existing CRM system,” Crowley says. That easy integration allowed for an astonishing implementation time. B&BW planned on having its second round of seasonal hires start the week before the go-live date in October 2007, and the company wanted to be able to utilize the new solutions for training purposes. Astute’s original estimate to Bath & Body Works for the implementation itself was approximately 200 hours, according to Liz Shaver, Astute’s RealDialog product manager. The final result? “We put [the solutions] in in 90 hours,” she says, with justifiable pride. “It was a very fast implementation for the CRM world.” Crowley agrees, recalling a prior implementation her company undertook that clocked in at more than 1,400 hours. With RealDialog, she says, “we were fully loaded one week ahead of schedule.” Crowley admits there was “a little bit of resistance” to swapping out the old 43 www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | OCTOBER 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - October 2008

CRM - October 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality�Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Sprinting Toward Disaster? SAP�Retains Market-Share Lead in�CRM A�Week of Strong Customer�Service CRM�on Twitter Build a Good Event and They Will Come Required Reading There's No Place Like Home The New Breed of CRM�Consultant The Price is Right...You Hope How Much Marketing is Too�Much? The�Sweet Smell of High-Quality�Service The Next Act! For An Acquisition Some Stories Never Get Old CRM�Eases the Pressure For WIKA�Instruments Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - October 2008

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