Win is a winner with Selligent
Win is a telecommunications systems and services integrator for the business world. It is also a pioneer in IP telephony. Win sees its mission as supporting enterprises and institutions throughout their telecommunications projects. As a subsidiary of the Belgian Belgacom group, it can offer the solutions of a major telecommunications partner yet has the flexibility and dynamism of an SME. To optimise its relations with its customers and prospects, but also to ensure that its 70-odd employees share the same tools and strategies, Win opted for the Selligent solution. Seems logical – an SME serving an SME.
Geoffroy JennesMarketing Manager
“We are now able to focus all our efforts on our customers and increase their satisfaction. We are also more attuned to the market. Selligent has helped us to improve the performance of our services. It has become absolutely crucial to us.”
“By maximising consistency and data sharing, Selligent has enabled Win to raise the professionalism of its customer relations across the board.”
Dynamism, flexibility and innovation, these are Win’s key tenets. A small, dedicated team that makes a point of being close to its customers, offering innovative solutions and responding rapidly to their needs. Its key strength is its ability to offer a global service that integrates telephony, Internet access, IT and networking services and solutions, distance working solutions, data security solutions, etc. That’s quite an asset, especially for small companies that do not always enjoy the benefits of an in-house IS department.
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Centralising customer information
As Win Marketing Manager, Geoffroy Jennes, explains, until 2002 none of the company’s sales or technical data were centralised. “Each department had its own database and its own terminology. With the result that we had innumerable redundancies. Worse, it inhibited considerably the co-operation among the different departments.” So, to optimise relations with customers, Win general management decided to provide its teams with a single tool to be shared by all the people involved in relations with the customer, be they commercial or technical. Consolidating all customer information into a single, common data library would also lead to the implementation of a reporting system for all the company’s activities, which was also lacking at the time.
Scalability and integration
Win started by writing specifications and then checking out the market for the ideal tool that would help transform its organisation into a customer-centric company. “Above all, we wanted a solution that could expand rapidly depending on the needs of our teams. But also one that would integrate seamlessly with the other tools we had – in particular our technical database – so that the CRM could accommodate, centrally all the data needed by the people concerned with customer relations,” notes Jennes. Selligent fulfilled those conditions. It covered Win’s functional needs and guaranteed swift implementation and top-notch support. In addition, Selligent’s geographic proximity and its over 15 years of experience in CRM were rather reassuring.
Skills transfer
But Win’s choice was based primarily on technical considerations. Win wanted to maintain full independence in managing its CRM system, and Selligent seemed to them to be the easiest system to manage in-house. So they started out by setting up a small team to manage the solution – two developers and a co-ordinator responsible for ensuring overall consistency. Today, the same team is in charge of continuous development of the solution; updates are added once or twice a month to respond to new needs or to simplify certain processes.
Simplify to unite
“Implementing Selligent demanded major changes to the way our sales people worked and a special effort to code the data. But a CRM system only makes sense if it is used by everyone. So we worked on two fronts. The project team focused on simplifying the processes as much as possible as well as on finding ways to reduce coding time. At the same time management gradually imposed the use of the application by only taking into account the information that was contained in it,” explains Jennes. He adds that “today, only two manual coding processes are still operational, one at sales and administrative level and the other in project management. All the rest is automated, and that guarantees consistent data and smooth information flows among the teams.”
Well-oiled processes
oday, all the users are converts to the system. It has become their prime tool. The full sales cycle is managed through Selligent, from the identification of leads and opportunities through to contract signing. And once the contract is signed, the system automatically manages the internal orders that will enable the technical team to take over and implement the project. This way the project manager can follow the process through on the basis of input from the sales representative – he/she issues the necessary orders to suppliers and agrees the installation plan with the customer. Each interaction, be it with the customer or supplier, is recorded in Selligent such that the account manager can also monitor the project’s progress at any time. All customer support tasks also go through Selligent. The telephony interface enables the customer to be identified based on the calling number, while the bi-directional integration with the database provides each Selligent user with a full, consistent overview of the information concerning the customer and the current installation. And that means a faster, more accurate response that takes into account the customer’s specific situation and the track record of all relations with Win. More recently, Win has also been managing its service level agreements through Selligent, with the result that the help desk agents can now set intervention priorities.
Reliable forecasting and meeting deadlines
At top management level, reports have been created to analyse all the company’s business – in particular to establish a precise overview of planned revenue for the forthcoming months. As Jennes stresses, “with more reliable forecasts for the next six to twelve months, we are in a better position to take immediate action if we notice a downturn, for example, by launching a marketing campaign to generate new leads.” Furthermore, an analysis of the time required to set up different types of project now enables Win to fine-tune its offerings, estimate accurately the workload and timetable needed to implement a given project, and respect the deadlines communicated to the customer.
A dedicated customer portal
A secure portal was set up a few months ago. It enables Win customers to benefit from on-line access to a mass of information, some of it coming from the Selligent database. They can consult the details of their invoices and monitor the requests they have sent to Win customer support.
Two new projects
Win’s next objective is to leverage the use of Selligent for marketing and communications. “By September 2007, the system should allow us to develop targeted campaigns, especially to promote particular solutions tailored to the products the customers are already using,” Jennes points out. “Then we will get to work on a process of managing our communications actions in function of the customer profile and his centres of interest. Here, the aim is to target our messages more accurately so as not to bother the customers with messages they aren’t interested in. »
Results in line with expectations
By maximising consistency and data sharing, Selligent has enabled Win to raise the professionalism of its customer relations across the board. As Jennes underscores, “we are now able to focus all our efforts on our customers and increase their satisfaction. We are also more attuned to the market. While it may not be easy to detect a direct link with our increase in turnover, it is certain that Selligent has helped us to improve the performance and efficiency of our services. Selligent has become absolutely crucial to us.” Courted customers, satisfied employees and a high-performing company. What more could one want?
