Digitization at redIT

Customer Relationship Management – understand and support the customer better

Almost all company missions and company strategies contain «customer orientation» enthalten. This also applies to the redIT mission: «We accompany our customers into the working world 4.0. We develop and optimize the dimensions employees, working environment, processes & technologies so that our customers remain successful on 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 placed the field of action «customer orientation» at the center of our digitization strategy from the very beginning and launched the CRM @redIT initiative.

The procedure was the same as for the other digitization initiatives. The project team – comprising representatives from all business units under the leadership of the head of sales and marketing – started with the maturity analysis, in the customer orientation field of action and a company-wide requirements catalog. 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, principles for implementation, and implementation roadmap in a management workshop.

3. CRM is the core system

The «ERP as much as necessary, as little as possible» 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 critically evaluate them against the requirements. Decisions are also made on the basis of facts rather than individual assumptions.

Due 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 test the first version of the CRM Sales Module only six weeks after the go-live.

With the continuous feedback from the test users, we successfully launched the first productive version in November 2020. In December 2020, we were already able to successfully handle the first marketing campaign. The next milestone was the introduction of the new ticketing system at the end of March 2021 and currently we are starting with the implementation of the field service requirements. The feedback from employees and our customers is very positive and as many customer interactions occur online due to Corona, the CRM is more important than ever as every activity can be easily tracked in the system.

CRM Dashboard

3. 360 degree customer view – better collaboration and faster decisions

An important requirement was that all customer information is available to employees in their respective work context. We have achieved all our goals here: thanks to the deep integration with Outlook & Microsoft Teams, all activities of the customer team are stored in a timeline, any document can be accessed anywhere via the Sharepoint-based storage, transaction data from FIBU is available via the integrated  Power BI Reports.Of course, all these functionalities can also be used via cell phone.

4. Digital marketing needs a modern CRM

CRM has allowed us to take our marketing to a new level. Gone are the days when we had to send Excel lists around to get information from salespeople on customer selections. Now all teams are working in CRM and data quality and response times have been greatly improved. By connecting to our web and social media sites and communication tools e.g. newsletters, we have achieved a level of consistency that is an absolute must for digital marketing.