Selligent satisfies Sodexho’s appetite for fast growth
To meet the needs of its sales force, faced with the growing demands of a diverse customer base and to provide management with key performance indicators, Sodexho Pass, the leader in Food and Management services, needed a first class sales management tool. The company has been using Selligent since 1999.
nicolas gielenIT project leader
“Our Selligent CRM system is at the basis of Sodexho’s entire management information system”
“As our marketing actions are a part of the CRM application, the impact on sales productivity is tremendous”
‘Satisfying a world of differences’ is the philosophy of the Sodexho group, a specialist and acknowledged leader in Food and Management services. Sodexho Pass Belgium issues over 100 million luncheon vouchers a year to 600,000 individuals in 15,000 companies and organisations. A Selligent CRM system is helping satisfy the many differences of Sodexho’s diverse customer base in Belgium, while contributing a high quality of business intelligence to financial and marketing management decision makers in the company. With the success of the first Selligent CRM project for Sodexho in Belgium, the application is now deployed in Sodexho’s Spanish and German subsidiaries.
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A better view of the business
Sodexho Pass Belgium has deployed a Selligent Customer Relationship Management system since 1999, the direct result of a company decision to provide top-level commercial management tools for a dynamic business with a growing consumer demand. The company wished to make available to management key performance indicators that would help them visualise immediately current business progress against financial and strategic objectives, essential in the highly competitive and fast moving luncheon voucher sector. “Our Selligent CRM system is at the basis of Sodexho’s entire management information system, integrated closely with third party analytical and visualisation tools”, said Nicolas Gielen, IT project leader for Sodexho Pass.
Light and flexible
Selligent’s CRM software runs on an Oracle database operating on a Tru64 hardware. The Selligent application itself operates on a server running Citrix Metaframe. One of the advantages of using Citrix is that it permits mobile users to obtain good performance when connecting to the Selligent application, even with a regular standard phone line. Another advantage is the reduction of administration and maintenance since there is no Selligent application installed on client devices. This thin-client approach guarantees an excellent level of services for multiple remote end users, including Sodexho’s sales staff around various parts of the country.
The heart of the sales and marketing activity
Sodexho’s CRM system is an integrated part of the company’s business activities which facilitates the management of both prospects and clients, covering every commercial activity of the company. “By integrating luncheon voucher production with our CRM system our sales people can visualise orders and see the exact current situation of received vouchers,” says Nicolas Gielen. As well as saving staff time by issuing personalised confirmations to customers, the system also streamlines the manner in which sales people interact and communicate with their clients. The database contains references of more than 100,000 Belgian companies each with more than 5 employees, a resource that is actively exploited by Sodexho’s marketing people. “As our marketing actions are a part of the CRM application, the impact on sales productivity is tremendous,” says Gielen. “For example, we know exactly which firms we contacted for a targeted action, how they reacted, their buying patterns by sector or region and how they respond to our messages.”
Important Return on Investment
Within the framework of Sodexho’s IT budget, the CRM investment was considered relatively modest and the return on investment over the time that the system has been operational has been important. As an enterprise platform, the Selligent system also played a part in helping Sodexho build its first e-business site offering online ordering to clients. After the initial pilot phase, 75% of enterprises that answered the survey have expressed an interest for online ordering, for which speed and ease of use are the most important criteria. “Without a CRM tool Sodexho would not have been able to absorb the growing workload because of the success of our company in this marketplace,” says Nicolas Gielen.
