Better marketing
With information on all customer-related activities now indexed against a single customer record in the CRM system, CommtechWireless has found it is far more able to run smaller, more effective marketing campaigns than it could in the past. Highly targeted marketing can be directed at small groups of potential customers based on their past interactions with CommtechWireless.
"At the moment we've got around 30,000 companies we believe are potential resellers, and the way we convert those leads and opportunities into a sale is by bombarding these guys with promotional material," Buzza says.
"The prospecting database we use comes from a whole range of sources, and our product lines are relatively diverse, so all of our sales and account managers needed to feed the data into one central platform. By customising about 50 of the fields in the CRM system, we can target our marketing campaigns. Using CRM in that fashion we get much higher direct mail and e-mail responses."
Nathan Buzza, CommtechWireless CEO
"Previously, Web site enquiries would come in as e-mails, and I couldn't get any metrics to know whether or not they had been dealt with," says Buzza. "Now I can ensure they're followed up, and the flow of information between anyone dealing with that customer is logged at a central point. It has just made my management of the sales department a lot easier so we can get metrics out faster and easier."
Having quickly come to appreciate the benefits of the unified CRM database, late last year CommtechWireless upgraded its system to Microsoft CRM 3.0, which among its many benefits has improved workflow processes through better integration with Outlook. Now, for example, the CRM application uses Outlook to send and manage e-mails that were previously -- and much more slowly -- handled through the CRM system.
The system has also been integrated with the company's Avaya IP Office PABX, which automatically reads caller ID data to extract information on the customer from the CRM system. Now well established within the company, the CRM system has given CommtechWireless a new infrastructure for supporting its continued growth here and overseas.
"As the business was growing, we had more people being employed and were experiencing communications breakdowns because there were no work processes in place to get that information," Buzza recalls. "CRM has allowed us to grow faster but still maintain those lines of communication."
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