It began with some innocent sales talk over drinks and munchies at a warehouse opening party for eyeglass parts manufacturers. After a few rounds, Mike Heilman, then vice president of sales at shipping and supply chain services provider Airborne, and officials of a large US-based Airborne client exuberantly agreed that Airborne would be a great choice for handling the manufacturer's European as well as its American business.
Back at Airborne's headquarters, when Heilman told the company's international sales officials about the potential deal, one of them pointed out that Airborne was already doing lots of business with the eyeglass maker in Europe. As Homer Simpson would say, "Doh!"
That executives at two large enterprises might be unaware of whom their companies were doing business with in Europe is not a unique story, experts say. While many organisations have spent the last couple of years and lots of money deploying CRM (customer relationship management) systems to better identify and cater to their best customers, few have, so far, taken the next step: extending CRM to encompass global operations and customers. Until now. According to Sue Handman, national solutions practice director for RCG Information Technology, her consulting company is regularly hearing from multinational companies wanting to expand their CRM efforts to include all their offices worldwide.
But, experts caution, enterprises attempting to deploy CRM globally will face daunting challenges. In many cases, international subsidiaries use different business processes and customer data formats and definitions than domestic operations, so global CRM will often require re-engineering and data cleansing. Then there's the language issue. Not all commercial CRM products support a wide array of languages, so global deployment may not be possible. At the same time, enterprises collecting customer information globally will face a variety of privacy regulations, some of them quite restrictive.
Because of these challenges, said Esteban Kolosky, an analyst for Gartner, "No global company has managed complete CRM, and it will be a long while before anyone does."
As a result, experts say, enterprises contemplating global CRM should keep their initial efforts focused on a specific and solvable problem such as SFA (sales force automation). And, in the case of large, fast-growing multinationals, the idea of a single, integrated repository of customer information may simply not be practical.
If enterprises attempt to globalise everything at once--SFA, marketing and customer service, for example--they could easily wind up in a CRM quagmire, RCG's Handman said.
"I've seen numerous multinationals that are three years into a five-year CRM project," she said, "trying to get things perfect, while the department that desperately needs CRM still doesn't have it yet."
One step at a time
That's exactly the kind of situation Airborne's Heilman wants to avoid. For the first phase of the company's global CRM efforts, Airborne is concentrating only on SFA, said Heilman, who is now the vice president and general manager of Airborne Logistics Services in Seattle, a division of another Airborne subsidiary, ABX Air Inc., of Wellington, Ohio. The new software system for that global SFA deployment, provided by Onyx Software goes live this week.
Each Airborne salesperson--covering all subsidiaries, including international sales representatives based in foreign countries--will have complete visibility into all sales activities by accessing the application through an Internet portal. The total cost to date, including training and licensing fees for 700 seats: US$3.5 million, which is slightly below what the company budgeted for the project, according to Heilman.
The payoff for that investment, he said, is that Airborne's sales staff will be better able to coordinate its approach to customers and keep them happy. In the past, with no integrated view of global customer activity, Airborne has had a segmented approach to customers. And that has led to Airborne's being, if anything, too attentive.
"Customers have told us they might get calls in one day from sales reps in warehousing, in supply chain management, in freight," Heilman said. "They've told us that they want just one face."
Airborne is now making sure all salespeople worldwide have reliable Internet connections and that the Onyx system is easy for all of them to use.
For the next phase of the project, Heilman said the company would like to use the Onyx application to manage the customer service department database as well. That way, a salesperson could easily access information on any service issues customers may have anywhere in the world before going into a meeting with them. No date has been set on the project, he said, partly because the current legacy system for customer service has been working well. But Airborne is in the process of creating some portal links to give salespeople some visibility into customer service in the meantime.
The company has also managed to sidestep any possible language barriers by mandating that all sales activities be conducted and recorded in English.
Contents
Think globally, act locally | |
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Private data: Handle with care | |
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Why global CRM? | |
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Global CRM hurdles | |
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