CRM: Digitalization at redIT
Customer Relationship Management – understanding and supporting customers better
Almost all company missions and company strategies contain this in some form "Customer focus" contain. This also applies to the redIT mission: “We accompany our customers into the world of work 4.0. We develop and optimize the dimensions of employees, working environment, processes and technologies so that our customers remain successful in the market. A consistent focus on the customer first means knowing the customer as well as possible and striving for a 360 degree customer view. To achieve these goals we have this “Customer orientation” field of action at the center of ours right from the start Digitization strategy set and the CRM @redIT Initiative started.
The procedure was the same as for the other digitalization initiatives. The project team - made up of representatives from all business units under the leadership of the sales and marketing manager - started with the Maturity analysis, in the field of customer orientation, and a company-wide catalog of requirements. We categorized the requirements in a matrix according to the dimensions of customer profile data (companies, contacts, contracts), interactions (communication, sales opportunities, service and support requests, work orders) and business transactions (sales orders, billing, deliveries). Building on the maturity analysis and requirements matrix, through which we developed a common understanding of the challenges, we developed the strategic decisions, the principles for implementation and the implementation roadmap in a management workshop.
3. CRM is the core system
With the “ERP as much as necessary, as little as possible” This approach avoids overlaps, simplifies processes and reduces the complexity of interfaces. This approach also ensures easy expandability with additional applications.
4. Zero-based and fact-based
With the zero-based approach, we avoid simply adopting “old” processes, but rather evaluate them critically based on the requirements. Decisions are also made based on facts and not individual assumptions.
Thanks to the agile approach in the project (e.g. the parallel development of the workflow and interaction processes and the technical implementation or the modularization of the task packages), the management team and a selected group of employees were able to launch the first version of the CRM Sales Module just six weeks after Test starting signal.
With continuous feedback from test users, we successfully launched the first productive version in November 2020. The first marketing campaign was successfully completed in December 2020. The next milestone was the introduction of the new ticketing system at the end of March 2021 and we are currently starting to implement the field service requirements. The feedback from employees and our customers is very positive and since many customer interactions occur online due to Corona, the CRM is more important than ever as every activity in the system can be easily tracked.
3. 360 degree customer view – better collaboration and faster decisions
An important requirement was that all customer information was available to employees in the respective work context. We have achieved all of our goals here: thanks to the deep integration into Outlook & Microsoft Teams, all of the customer team's activities are stored in a timeline, every document can be accessed anywhere via the Sharepoint-based storage, transaction data from the FIBU is available via the integrated Power BI reports available. Of course, all of these functionalities can also be used via mobile phone.
4. Digital marketing needs a modern CRM
With CRM we were able to take our marketing to a new level. Gone are the days when we had to send around Excel lists to get information from salespeople about customer selection. All teams now work in CRM and the data quality and response times have been greatly improved. By connecting to our web and social media sites and communication tools such as newsletters, we have achieved a level of consistency that is an absolute must for digital marketing.