Download Managing Customer Relationships – A Case Study

Commentary
I
n today’s highly competitive business
environment, a good IT infrastructure
will only benefit enterprises regardless
of their nature – be it sales, engineering
or marketing. One commonly used
IT tool is the customer relationship
management (CRM) system, software
designed to keep track of customers
and clients while allowing ready access
to information pertaining to them.
A good CRM system will benefit any
and all businesses involved in selling
products or services, allowing them to
track targets, long-term trends as well as
Director at Integral Solutions (Asia) Pte
Ltd, on the importance of appropriate
CRM elements.
“Thus the right analytics (data mining)
strategy will ensure that SMEs
benefit tremendously from their CRM
implementation. Data mining will be able
to discover root causes to help SMEs
generate more profit and improve
productivity,” she advised.
In addition, designing and then
implementing a CRM system is not
something that can be done in a workday.
customers requiring pilots to guide some
160 ships a month while still ensuring
the safety of said pilots. Australian
Reef Pilots also collects and analyses
data including pilot history, schedules,
shipping information, environmental data
and material from regulatory bodies – this
necessitates a dependable and powerful
CRM system to manage the inordinate
amount of daily data.
To further put into perspective the amount
of data exchanged in the course of the
company’s business, information crucial
to the trade come from a plethora of
Managing Customer
Relationships
– A Case Study
A good customer relationship management
system will do wonders for your business
customer preferences. That said, CRM
systems do not come cheap: systems
incorporating exotic functions like the
Sales Automation Force and contact
management software can easily amount
to upwards of millions of dollars. This
effectively dissuades small and medium
enterprises (SMEs) from adopting such
a system, while potentially profitable
can only be afforded by the largest
of companies boasting the biggest IT
support budgets.
“CRM with operation tracking might
not be sufficient to fulfil the needs of
CRM for business. CRM without
analytics is like keeping track of
customers’ information without the ability
to think,” said Ms Irene Boey, Consulting
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Entrepreneurs’ Digest
The setting up of a fully-fledged system
could take days to even weeks, and
even then employees must receive
rigorous training in order to properly
use and manage the new CRM
system. Furthermore, many features in
a CRM system are unneeded or
underutilised by smaller businesses,
turning into additional costs and
deadweight. All these translate into
escalated IT budgets for a system
that can never be fully used to its
fullest potential.
Case in point: Australian Reef Pilots is
a marine pilotage service provider that
aids ships to safely traverse the pilotage
areas of the Great Barrier Reef and Torres
Strait. For their day to day business,
the company receives requests from
different sources: internal Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets, Microsoft Outlook data,
customer feedback as well as details from
both the Federal and State government
regulatory bodies. For bookings, Excel
spreadsheets were used in conjunction
with Outlook, but manual data entry had
a high margin of error and produced
unreliable data, affecting the everyday
business of the company. Australian
Reef Pilots required a more streamlined
and efficient way to both manage
the booking process as well as to unify
the company’s distributed workforce (the
pilots and the support staff).
In the span of three months (October
to December 2011), the pilotage
company implemented a marine-
Commentary
industry solution built on Microsoft Dynamics’
CRM Online, a powerful CRM software provided
as a cloud service from Microsoft boasting
remarkable features like instant access from
virtually anywhere in the world. With this new
system in place, Australia Reef Pilots dramatically
transformed its booking process, reducing the
margin of error by an impressive amount. This
restructured booking system also improved vital
business processes like customer management,
safety performance audits, invoicing and financial
reporting. The new CRM also allowed Australia
Reef Pilots to streamline not just its booking
system, but the entire IT infrastructure within
the company.
Needless to say, Mr Simon Meyjes, Chief Executive
Officer of Australian Reef Pilots is pleased with
the end results, “We’ve achieved nearly all our
objectives for the new system in a very short
timeframe and at a surprisingly low cost.”
important as your business matures,” according
to Mr Michael Park, Corporate Vice-president
of MBS Sales, Marketing and Operations at
Microsoft Corporation.
The use of an advanced CRM system (if built and
implemented properly) will do wonders for any
business, but caution must be exercised when
considering its use, for a myriad of different factors
will affect the eventual look and feel of the final
system. Businesses – SMEs in particular – must
copiously assess the full spectrum of specifications
and technicalities before settling on a system that
will best suit their needs.
“Giving your customers the best experience begins
with a complete view of your sales pipeline, but
it does not end there. A customer relationship
management (CRM) system will integrate people
and technology to maximise external relationships,”
Mr Park finished.
“For smaller businesses, nurturing and retaining
your loyal customers becomes increasingly
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Entrepreneurs’ Digest
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