AG2R ensures the success of its sales strategy with Selligent
To be in a position to carry out its sales strategy, AG2R, the leading French inter-occupational supplementary welfare group, realised that it had to implement a customer relationship management tool. In 1998, the group opted for Selligent due to its functional coverage and great flexibility.
michel hallayIn charge of the functional section of the project
“With Selligent, we now know every customer of every part of the group so well, that we can make them tailored offers”
“For us, the main advantage of Selligent lies in the possibility of organising sales activities in phase with national marketing campaigns”
Founded in 1951, today AG2R is the leading French inter-occupational supplementary welfare group for employees and retirees, as well as a major life insurance provider. AG2R manages pensions, savings, welfare and supplementary health insurance for over 600,000 group contracts and more than 5 million working or retired individuals
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CRM, the indispensable tool for successful sales strategies
In 1998, AG2R realised that it had to implement a customer relationship management tool to give it a comprehensive, coherent overview of its clientele if its sales strategy of penetrating the collective savings and save-as-you-earn market was to succeed. Following a selection process involving 3 regional management teams, the sales management and the IT management, the group chose Selligent. This choice was motivated largely by the functional coverage and great flexibility of the solution.
Three fundamental elements
The issues relating to AG2R’s clientele were threefold. Firstly, customer information was scattered throughout the group and insufficiently structured. This made it difficult to have a 360° view of the group’s customers and the potential market. Secondly, the sales division did not have sufficiently effective follow-up and measurement tools. Finally, marketing operations lacked impact as they were poorly targeted. These obstacles to AG2R’s strategic approach thus formed the challenge to be taken up with the help of Selligent.
Clear goals and tangible benefits
The first goal was to produce a coherent customer database and enhance the information held about customers to provide a detailed picture of each customer and his requirements. As well as being connected to the management database, the Selligent database also allows for the retrieval of information from external files containing socio-demographic data in particular. Above all, Selligent enabled AG2R to optimise information feedback from the field. Once this information had been gathered, AG2R was able to set up a sales and marketing action plan. In terms of sales, the introduction of sales process management tools and prospect and customer relationship follow-up tools enabled AG2R to take an even more active approach to prospects and identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. As for the marketing department, it needed to be better able to categorise customers and prospects according to criteria such as their equipment, size and business, in order to target its activities more efficiently. Since it implemented Selligent, AG2R has launched some forty automated marketing campaigns that have proved to be significantly more effective than past campaigns.
Better targeted campaigns
300 people currently use Selligent on a daily basis. The Marketing Management produces action plans on behalf of the Regional Management teams, which put them into practice at a sales level. “With Selligent, we now know every customer of every part of the group so well that we can make them tailored offers. This makes targeting activities at prospects easier,” says Michel Hallay, who is in charge of the functional section of the project.
Selligent: the best choice for continuous progress
It was Selligent’s integrated functional approach that won AG2R over, as Michel Hallay testifies, “For us, the main advantage of Selligent at a functional level lies in the possibility of organising sales activities in phase with national marketing campaigns.” In addition to its functional cover, the group’s main reasons for choosing Selligent were its intuitive interface and advanced technology, which offered not only flexibility for customisation but also complete integration with Oracle. AG2R completed its migration to the new Selligent Xi platform at the beginning of July 2003 and has just extended the application to more users. Selligent’s scaleable architecture meant that the transition went smoothly. Again, this upgrade to the CRM solution implemented at AG2R should bring the group further success in the implementation of its new strategy, which focuses mainly on SMEs and SMIs and relates to savings products and enterprise creation. “Our database makes it easier for us to have exhaustive knowledge of our portfolio and the prospecting potential, as long as it is carefully maintained,” says Michel Hallay.
