CRM - November 2008 - (Page 45)

CHANGING THE CHANNEL Red Ventures, a Charlotte, N.C.–based marketing firm, has grown from a twoman shop eight years ago to more than 500 employees, and has increased its revenue 60-fold in three years—earning several nods from Inc. magazine’s Inc. 5000 list. But company executives say they see Red Ventures as more of a B2B marketing partner, working to acquire new and qualified customers for enterprises such as satellite-television provider DirecTV. As the largest reseller for DirecTV—a company that has seen its own share of growth, with the addition of nearly 4 million subscribers since 2002—the Red Ventures team attributes its success to several factors, one being its undying commitment to realtime answers. “Our offices are like a trading floor,” says Christy Durbin, president of two of the Red Ventures marketing wings. Employees, she says, are continually checking out the latest stats on any of the 15 monitors strewn around each of the two locations. “We aren’t waiting for a whole data pack at the end of the week,” Durbin says. “We’re responding quickly in a real-time fashion. We believe that we have the best data in the industry for the partners we support.” Part of the winning combo includes giving employees access to sales data on their BlackBerrys, and proprietary software that allows the company to dabble in various verticals. (In addition to DirecTV, Red Ventures recently signed deals with ADT Security and Sirius Satellite Radio.) Red Ventures also points to its dedication to the customer experience and to delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. “We’re able to tie all of our marketing initiatives and all the various pieces in the marketplace together, and to really track all the data and interaction points that the customer experiences in that process,” says Kevin D’Allaird, Red Ventures’ senior vice president of online marketing. —Lauren McKay “We’re able to tie all of our marketing initiatives together.” BOOSTING PRODUCTIVITY NORTH OF THE BORDER By streamlining workflows with Antenna Software’s AMPower Service, Pitney Bowes Canada found more time for customer calls he supposed benefit of smartphones is enabling remote workers to work more efficiently. Judging by the plight of road warriors at Pitney Bowes Canada (PBC), this is not always the case. Pitney Bowes provides a suite of what it calls mailstream software, hardware, services, and solutions to help companies manage the flow of mail, documents, and packages. The Canadian arm of the company—separate from operations in the United States and Europe—employs 400 field service workers, and their efforts generate millions of customer communications each month, says Jacques L’Africain, vice president of customer service for PBC. L’Africain says that, after coming on board three years ago, he pounded the pavement with workers to see how they operated. “I quickly came to the conclusion that the way they were doing business was not best and very unproductive,” he recalls, adding that field employees were using a technology that wasn’t mobilefriendly. “Imagine a 15-inch screen, typi- T cal for computers,” he says. “These workers had maybe a three-by-three[-inch] view on their mobile devices. [Navigating] the screen was very difficult.” He also discovered that employees were spending time at the end of the day feeding back information gathered during the workday into the mainframe field service system. “They were doing this on their own time, and I thought that was very unfair,” L’Africain says. “We pride ourselves on being a very good and fair employer.” L’Africain went in search of a mobile solution to improve worker productivity. After researching offerings from various vendors, he says, PBC opted for Jersey City, N.J.–based mobile solutions provider Antenna Software’s AMPower Service. Jim Somers, Antenna’s vice president of marketing, says that parent Pitney Bowes had been a customer since 2002, but Antenna had not yet reached the Canadian arm. Familiarity wasn’t enough, L’Africain says:“Pitney Bowes may have already been a partner, but Canada is on a different 45 www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | NOVEMBER 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

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

CRM - November 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Working with the Years CRM on Twitter Virtual Spenders Contact Centers Chatting to Success The Complexity Chasm Required Reading Generational Spending: A Special Report Who, What, Where, When, Y The Slackers’ X-cellent Adventure The Boomer Boom The Matures Endure Boosting Productivity North of the Border Changing the Channel Invicta’s Thrill of Victory Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - November 2008

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