The challenge
Alliance and Leicester Commercial Bank had a number of ‘Sales Relationship
Management’ systems in which needed to be replaced, as they were not delivering a complete view of the customer across divisions. This meant that they were restricted in providing a “joined up” service to their customers, which had implications in terms of service delivery.
It also affected the bottom line as any ability to cross sell complementary products was being missed. In addition, the company was eager to implement a solution that would be good enough to support its marketing activities and to strengthen its sales environment.
Since implementing Sage CRM MME, Alliance and Leicester is successfully managing its customer relationships by capturing targeted information about new customers, expanding sales efforts with its existing customer base, and increasing sales revenues. Howard Worthington -senior manager, database development, was responsible for the implementation of Sage CRM MME commented “We have a mixture of business customers from a sole-trader up to PLCs; we needed a system that could provide information covering the depth and breath of all sales relationships for every given company. A system that could work efficiently both in a call centre and field sales environment, Sage CRM MME has delivered on all these counts”.
The drivers for selecting Sage CRM MME Alliance and Leicester had two existing contact management systems in place, which did not interact. This prohibited them from delivering the highest level of service because customer information was not accessible through a single location. “We lacked a central system through which we could track all of our sales and opportunity information. Instead, we had two systems that didn’t connect with one another. It was difficult for our employees to determine the exact or current status of our accounts, they could only see their slice of the business” commented Worthington.
Alliance and Leicester determined the need for a Customer Relationship Management System that would “join up” the organisation and provide employees with a full profile of the customers with which they dealt. The company carried out extensive desk research on upwards of 30 systems, before finally short-listing six customer relationship management systems. From there they carried out six in-depth interviews with key suppliers to ensure each of their bushiness requirements were met. “Small systems got rejected due to lack of scabality and larger system either priced themselves out or were too complex for what we required”, commented Worthington.
Alliance and Leicester Commercial Bank’s key requirements for its new CRM solution were as follows:
- Replace existing legacy systems for two different business units, ‘Commercial
Finance’ and the ‘Business Banking’ - A centralised system, ensuring each business unit had the same overview of customer activity
- A flexible system, that was easily configurable and one that they could build on in the future
- An adaptable system that would fit with their existing database architecture
- A system that could address all keyworkflow process and key business requirements from each business unit
- A system that will ensure real-time access to the most up-to-date information
- A system robust enough to cater for a potential of 300 users – a direct sales team inbound and outbound, a customer service team and an extensive field sales team
- The ability to integrate with existing sales productivity tools, i.e. Microsoft Outlook
- Capability to integrate with the legacy mainframe systems within A&L Commercial
Bank
Sage Mid Market Edition was selected
Alliance and Leicester selected Sage CRM MME, as it was easy to use, intuitive and well designed. It found Sage CRM MME to be sufficiently flexible to automate its preferred business processes, and was built to work with its existing database architecture. Sage CRM MME offered advanced functionality, which was needed to run effective sales, marketing and customer care campaigns.
Sage CRM MME also provided configuration tools that allowed Alliance and Leicester to rapidly modify all aspects of the system. “Sage CRM MME’s web-based architecture greatly reduces deployment and maintenance costs as we could deploy on a single server and then simply provide access through a standard web browser for all the users. In addition most of the configuration could be done using Sage’s CRM MME’s intuitive and point and click configuration tools, We knew this would have terrific time and convenience benefits for us as the implementation progressed”
Another key determining factor in the selection process for Alliance and Leicester was the comprehensive Microsoft Outlook integration.Sage CRM MME has complete bi-directional synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook’s functions.
“This is an extremely compelling offering that, critically, is easy to navigate and the automated synching takes no time at all. We have also installed an SMS plug-in so that we can have immediate contact with our field sales staff. We mainly use the Outlook Integration feature for the replication of diaries: we are planning to auto-synch contact information in the future so that this information can be shared throughout the organisation.”
Implementation
Implementation and configuration of the new application went smoothly across three phases. Replacing the system in the Commercial Finance division was the initial phase, which was piloted over a three-month phase. The infrastructure (database structure and size, processing requirements) was scaled for the full 300-seat system although using fewer users initially. This was done to provide efficiencies in the ultimate system. User acceptance testing of the mapping of business processes and general stress testing of the system took place through this successful phase.
After the Phase 1 system successfully went live, the second phase (involving the replacement of the system in Business Banking and the addition of the Outlook integration. This was another successful 10 week process that had the additional complication of incorporating the field sales workers where the proof of the extensibility of the system was demonstrated.
Commented Howard Worthington, “What was most pleasing was the growing acceptance of the system by the users. Mapping the technical aspects and configuring the system to match our requirements were challenging but we were always fairly certain we could accomplish what we wanted with the system. What is always less certain is whether the users will use it.
With the combination of the innate usability of the system and its integration with Outlook we have found the feedback from users on the usability of the system to be a key factor in its success so far.”
Phase 3, which is ongoing at the time of printing, is to provide access to a number of data points that reside on mainframe systems around the Alliance and Leicester Commercial Bank Group. inter-face, increasing the usefulness of the system for its users.
They knew what functionality they wanted to build. They know what users they needed to grant access to and they knew from where those users would access the system, whether in the field or in-house. They know the productivity tools they needed to integrate with in order to foster use of the system. With all of this in mind they selected enough technology to get them there.
Sage CRM MME delivered on three critical areas: enough functionality to deliver the tools that would aid the productivity of the users: a delivery method (the web) that would allow access to all users rapidly and easily: configurable and flexibility that allowed A&L Commercial Bank to tailor the system rapidly to its specific needs and requirements.
