With Selligent, Acova customers are never left out in the cold
As a leader and specialist in heating solutions that enhance energy efficiency, decor and living comfort on the French market, Acova has to maintain a position at the forefront of innovation by offering original and aesthetic radiators of exceptional dimensions with a wide range of colours and individual finishes. At the same time, these radiators must provide superb performance. Often copied by its competitors, Acova not only has to shine with its innovative abilities but also with the quality of its customer services. Mission accomplished with Selligent!
Deny RoudièreCRM Project Manager
“CRM is not a control tool. The ultimate goal is still ‘customer satisfaction’ and that is generated by commercial efficiency, the reliability of our products and the speed of our responses to their demands.”
“The volume of e-mails has diminished considerably because all of the information needed by the sales teams is stored in Selligent and is accessible by everyone”
As a French subsidiary of the European Zehnder group, Acova markets its products via a network of distributors. The aim of the company is to sell the brand image to the public while supporting a network of professionals (resellers, recommenders and installers). In 2002, the Zehnder group decided to consolidate its commercial and market data on a European scale. The various business units concerned were directly involved with the project and a list of specifications was established by the parent company according to the detailed requirements of each entity of the group. About ten Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products were then evaluated on the basis of global needs.
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The European dimension
Deny Roudière, head of the CRM project for the French subsidiary of the group and a member of the European committee for the selection of the solution, explained the conditions behind this selection. “It was clear from the start that we needed to make use of a software package that was available on the market. Taking account of the European dimension of the project, we had to have an international solution that fulfilled specific local needs and was sufficiently flexible to allow easy implementation and deployment. Furthermore, we attached considerable importance to the multilingual aspects of the solution and the European scale of the provider.” In addition, the CRM system would have to be capable of interfacing with a new ERP system as well as satisfying real technical and functional constraints without lengthy and costly development. “The CRM project started at the same time as the implementation of a new ERP system in some units of the group. However, an ERP project is usually time consuming and we could not deal with two missions of that magnitude simultaneously. It was therefore essential that the CRM solution would be scalable and easy to integrate so as to make the project less cumbersome and faster to implement.” Finally, Selligent was selected="selected"following detailed evaluation of some forty selection criteria as well as consideration of a number of more subjective characteristics such as the dynamism of the supplier and its reputation with its customers.
Progressive deployment
Although the roll-out started in Germany in 2003, Acova was not fully equipped until the end of 2005. Nevertheless, the project ran according to schedule and was implemented without major difficulty. Today, the entire group has a comprehensive CRM solution which took only 2 to 3 years to complete. “Unlike Germany - which had reached the limits of its ‘in-house’ CRM solution - in France we were using a system that, although it did not enable us to grow our commercial and marketing organisation, still had life in it. Consequently, there was no real urgency,” explained Deny Roudière. The French project therefore started in 2005, driven by French sales management. Deny Roudière was appointed as head of the project and was charged with structuring the approach. Conscious of the need to involve future users from the start of the process, the company set up a pilot group consisting of field sales staff, marketing staff and customer service representatives. At the same time, a pilot ‘Management’ group was created, not only because management is required to use the integrated dashboards and analysis tools but also because management has to assume a motivational role for the teams. A new list of specifications, covering the specific needs of Acova, was then established with the help of the pilot groups. “We asked the users to forget about the tool they had been using up to that point, to reflect on their way of working and on what they needed to perform more efficiently. It was important that the tool should provide every user with the information they required to do their job”, Deny Roudière explained.
Focusing on the customer
Currently, the solution is used every day by the whole sales, marketing and customer service departments – that is around 65 Acova people in total. Members of the sales staff now have not only a detailed synopsis of their customers but also dynamic information on their own activities. They can analyse their achievements or even measure the effectiveness of their approach compared to the company’s strategic plan. They also benefit from additional tools to carry out targeted sales activities with the help of standard documents and pre-defined support material stored in the document management module. In addition, they can now store all of the information on the products displayed in their distributors’ showrooms. Consequently, customer service staff can easily guide the individual who wishes to see a product on show with a reseller. All customer requests are dealt with by the customer service staff, whether they concern help with the choice of a product, the answer to a technical question or even intervention in the case of a breakdown. Currently, it is still necessary to find customers in the system before giving them an answer or transferring calls to the right person. “However,” says Deny Roudière “we envisage setting up integrated CTI so as to be able to directly qualify the calls and deal with our customers selectively, so offering them products adapted to their profile. We wanted this project to both integrate the philosophy of CRM and really focus on the expectations of the customer. That’s why it was essential that all of the people in contact with the end-user had the same overview.” The Selligent dashboards enable the management to analyse the activities of the company as well as to manage the motivation of the team and to guide the sales staff.
A smooth transition
Overall, Acova has not had to face too much reluctance from users because they were already familiar with IT tools in general and CRM in particular. Acceptance of the new system took place smoothly, thanks to an operational test phase. Deny Roudière explains his approach. “We allowed the users to continue to use the old tool while testing the new solution. In that way, we were able to make the necessary adjustments so that the final version satisfied all of the principal needs of the users.” User training was also organised in stages, firstly with the introduction of the tool and its applications and then with more advanced sessions following 3 months of work in production. “At the start,” Deny Roudière confides, “the users were a little frustrated, because the training they had received with Selligent did not allow them to do everything they could do with the old system. However, if we had allowed them to do that, no doubt they would have had difficulty in assimilating all of the information in a few days of training, without having first acquired some hands-on experience with the tool.”
From client-server to the web
Acova initially decided on the Selligent client-server version. However, between the selection of the tool in Switzerland and the start of the project in France, two years had passed and web technology had by then demonstrated its advantages. The Selligent web version offered numerous benefits – central administration, fewer maintenance operations, reduction of technical costs, etc. However, even if Deny Roudière was convinced that the web was the way of the future, he told us, “This transition to the Web was not entirely straightforward. In fact, as all our sales people are on the road, they have to be able to access all information remotely. The secure connection system enabled them to connect from their home or a hotel for example but did not offer total mobility. It was therefore necessary to find additional solutions, such as Outlook synchronisation, which requires more preparation of commercial actions.”
Reduction of e-mail
Today, marketing and sales are totally integrated and Acova is starting to see the benefits of the system – better knowledge of the customer, improvements in sales productivity, time savings in the production of promotional campaigns, while also allowing management to see the activities of their teams at any time and with just a few clicks – but that’s not all. “The volume of e-mails has diminished considerably because all of the information needed by the sales teams is stored in Selligent and is accessible by everyone,” observes Deny Roudière.
Little by little
As well as the integration of CTI for the ten or so operators in the call centre, Acova also anticipates other developments such as the automation and recording of marketing campaigns. On the other hand, for Deny Roudière, it is not wise to go too fast. He says, “The tool is not everything - the issue here is the use that is made of it and the way in which it is managed. CRM is not a control tool and it is pointless to submerge the users in a pile of information that puts them off their job. The ultimate goal is still ‘customer satisfaction’ and that is generated by commercial efficiency, the reliability of our products and the speed of our responses to their demands.”
