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Service and a Smile
Gartner’s CRM Excellence Awards was a major highlight of the recent Gartner CRM Summit. There were three finalists: Electronic Arts, Lennox International, and Shaklee. Each shared their success story, based on a winning customer strategy that gives customers choice and gives front-line staff the information and support they need to deliver a compelling customer experience.
Lennox International, which offers commercial and residential heating, cooling, and refrigeration systems, created a segmentation strategy, and then organized customer service around that strategy. It took four months to create an ROI model for its supporting CRM implementation; the model projects a $9 million benefit as a result of using CRM for relationship building, reducing attrition, improving efficiencies, and cutting the cost to serve customers, as well as potential increasing market share. The company is currently rolling out handhelds loaded with mySAP CRM to improve field service; and it uses segmentation for intelligent routing in the contact center to deliver the right experience to its various customer segments.
Nutrition company Shaklee used its CRM strategy as a turnaround tool; it’s goal was to reverse falling sales, support brand reengineering, and regain market leadership. New leadership at the company drove the strategy from the top down; the IT-lead project team works closely with the business side to ensure the successful use of the companion CRM system from RightNow Technologies the company implemented to support its 25,000 business builders (customers who are also sales reps) and 750,000 members (end customers who don’t also sell). So far, so good. Customer satisfaction is at 89 percent, and the company has seen double digit sales growth since overhauling its customer strategy.
EA’s approach is to be proactive and constantly evolve its service delivery, like using a unique customer identifier to help better understand customers. EA also went from using 37 homegrown tools to using RightNow Technologies for a central database and knowledge base to improve service; the result is a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction and a 20 percent decrease in budget even though customer contact has increased 60 percent. Its goal is to cut 1 million incidents over the next year by embedding links to FAQs right in its games. It’s no surprise that EA took home this year’s award.
After the award ceremony Boyd Beasley, EA’s senior director of customer support, shared some of the game manufacturer’s success secrets with me. We’ll post the conversation in a 1to1 on the Run podcast next week.
Tim,
Agreed, CRM is a strategy first. Gartners Awards are judged on its eight building blocks of success, which includes such aspects as people, process, technology, and vision. Each of the three finalists addressed the building blocks differently and to varying levels. One example of EA's "CRM attitude" is its proactive approach to service. Service staff and developers work closely together to create games that are unlikely to require service, but also create actions and materials in advance of product releases to ensure that service staff are able to assist customers quickly and efficiently if problems do arise.
I must be missing something. Perhaps it was evident to those who attended the awards, but I don't see it in your write up.
CRM is not, primarily, a technology fix. The prime thing with CRM is a "state of mind" fix, because CRM is about attitude, and only later about technology. And what I don't see, and feel very stringly that you shoudl address in a future article, is "A CRM Attitude".
By this I mean truly putting the customer first, and showing it.
I don't mean treating the customer as a deity, some are patently not worth our while, but I do mean showing how understanding the needs of the customer is paramount in any CRM implementation.
I'd like to see what these guys did.