Selligent provides a sure CRM solution for Coface UK & Ireland
When Joe Chan, IT Director for Coface UK & Ireland, was given the mission of implementing a CRM system serving nearly two-thirds of the company’s staff in departments as diverse as Sales, Marketing, Risk and the Service Centre, and all in six month’s time, it was do or die. Joe needed to find a tool that could support multi-channel, multi-product processes in a complex sales environment, whilst remaining easy to configure and to use, to allow the whole project to be managed in-house, from specification to implementation to roll-out.
Joe ChanIT Director - Coface UK & Ireland
“Nobody envisaging a CRM project should underestimate the need for change management and user support. But it has all paid off, and the choice of a hassle-free CRM product was undeniably a contributing factor in this success story”
“Selligent contained all we needed to start creating and running marketing campaigns straight away. Very little customisation was required”
Click on the headings below to read the full article
Selling in all channels
Coface is present, in the UK & Ireland, as a branch of the Coface Group, the world’s leading export credit insurer. The company provides a range of credit management solutions helping businesses to trade domestically and overseas. A sales opportunity, for Coface, requires involvement from different actors in different departments: the commercial underwriters in Sales, obviously; but also the sales support staff in the Service Centre, in charge of all the administrative follow-up; and the Risk underwriters who provide the crucial risk analysis when putting together a quote. The CRM system therefore had to ensure timely access to the appropriate information for all these different profiles, and at the same time allow any information input by one actor to be visible to all the others. Besides these internal actors, a sales opportunity most often also involves channel partners such as brokers and intermediaries, through which many of Coface’s insurance products are sold. Thus another very important requirement for the CRM system was that it be able to deal with sales opportunities submitted through a channel partner, as well as through Coface’s own direct sales force, managing the necessary communication in each case to ensure a timely response. And timely processing of sales opportunities is, in the case of Coface, indeed of the essence: the CRM system needed to be able to cope with a high volume of submissions on a daily basis, whilst ensuring that each of them was turned around from reception to quote in a maximum of five working days. As if that were not enough, Coface were also at the same time rolling out three new business lines, each with their own products and their own business rules on how to qualify and quote a sales opportunity, but all handled by the same Sales team. So it was important that any internal actor looking at a sales opportunity could identify, at a glance, the product of interest, and that the CRM system took care of automatically routing a sales opportunity to the appropriate actor when so required by the product’s business rules.
Affordability, flexibility, scalability
Armed with all these requirements, the CRM Project Team at Coface established a shortlist of CRM editors, who were each asked to produce a proof-of-concept demonstrating their product’s ability to meet their needs. Selligent made the cut, as a vendor with whom Coface had worked before, and who were involved with several CRM projects within other Coface Group entities. The decision was easily made: the Selligent CRM solution, based on Selligent X@, was the only one which provided the necessary flexibility in its customisation whilst remaining affordable; which offered enough standard functionality and user-friendly configuration tools to ensure that the project could be delivered on time, on budget and on spec; and which promised at the same time ample scalability to adapt to Coface’s changing needs in the future.
Information just a click away
According to Christian Moins, IT Programme Manager for Coface UK & Ireland, the Selligent CRM solution proved easily customisable to provide users with an interface where the next operation is always only a click away, and where information is always presented in a way that is contextually meaningful. “Dashboards are one of the great features of Selligent X@”, says Christian. “They give users the complete picture of all the sales opportunities that they’re working on, and what action is required on their part, automatically taking account of their user profile. And users find it much easier to deal with all incoming new business in a timely manner, because as soon as anything is created or updated, it shows up in their dashboards.” Before the CRM system was put in place, the different departments at Coface were working on different systems and information was scattered and duplicated. Dealing with any sales opportunity meant a constant exchange of e-mails, with multiple copies of relevant documents stored in several different locations. The built-in document management features of the Selligent CRM solution did away with all that. “Now, when a user actions a sales opportunity from one of their dashboards, it is instantaneously and seamlessly transferred to whomever needs to deal with it next”, Christian adds. “And when the next user picks it up from their dashboard, they know that they’ll have the whole history of what has been done in that sales opportunity at their fingertips.” No e-mails anymore, then? “The only e-mails that are being generated now are to external actors, such as brokers and intermediaries, and to the prospects themselves”, answers Christian. “But because Selligent also has built-in integration with Lotus Notes e-mail, they are generated directly from the CRM system.” “Better yet”, Christian goes on to explain, “this is done using e-mail templates created in the CRM system itself; again, through its document management features.” When these templates are actioned to send an e-mail in response to a sales opportunity, they are automatically merged with the recipient’s details stored in the CRM system, and a copy of the e-mail produced is also automatically saved against the sales opportunity.“ It not only saves time and prevents errors”, Christian enthuses. “That way, all the documents, notes and e-mails exchanged for a sales opportunity are available to anyone, from any department, working on that sales opportunity. Our users are thrilled by the information that is now open to them.”
Best for standard functionality
But the benefits of the CRM system are not just about its adaptability. According to Dominique Vaughan Williams, Marketing Director for Coface UK & Ireland, the Selligent CRM solution was also chosen because of the standard functionality offered by default in the product, especially for Marketing campaigns. “It contained all we needed to start creating and running Marketing campaigns straight away”, says Dominique. “Very little customisation was required.” The availability, in the Selligent CRM solution, of a separate chapter supporting lead generation processes is also a plus. “We can load all our suspects into the CRM system and run Marketing campaigns to them, without any impact on the database of companies and contacts who have already been qualified”, concurs Dominique. “But the system also provides built-in tools to promote a qualified suspect into the database of companies and contacts, so that the lead management process can resume from there, without losing any of the qualification history from the campaign.”
CRM, the whole hard slog
Looking back at the CRM project, and what it took to get it delivered on time, on budget and on spec, Joe Chan muses that mastering the Selligent CRM solution was the least of their challenges. “Of course any IT project with tight deadlines will involve people working long hours and into weekends, and our staff in the CRM Project Team showed total dedication that way”, Joe acknowledges. “And it helped that we had an experienced CRM Lead Analyst on board. But the real challenge was dealing with the change management underlying the CRM project.” The CRM Project Team was aware of the lack of user adoption as the number-one cause of failure for CRM projects. Therefore the roll-out of the new CRM system included not only a thorough training programme for CRM users in the weeks before delivery, but, most importantly, extensive user support afterwards, with Team members present in all the offices. “Nobody envisaging a CRM project should underestimate the need for change management and user support”, Joe cautions. But it has all paid off, and the choice of a hassle-free CRM product was undeniably a contributing factor in this success story. With more than 100 users now on the CRM system and new functionality being added all the time, Selligent has been indeed a sure solution for Coface UK
