Going Steady

As CG companies strive to retain customers and provide better service, the need to invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) becomes more severe. But the way companies purchase and deploy CRM will dramatically change in the near future, according to a recent AMR Research report. CRM should not be viewed as a suite but a collection of tools to be installed incrementally, the report states. CRM systems must also adapt to existing infrastructures and allow users to easily define how they manage and share data, workflow, business logic and presentation standards across installed systems.

Steady Progression

"Based on our experience, I recommend incremental change," says Jeffrey Howren, manager sales information for Bayer HealthCare's Consumer Care Division, which operates in more than 90 countries with 5,478 employees. Bayer Consumer Care includes brands such as Aspirin, Alka-Seltzer and One-A-Day vitamins.

Howren describes Bayer's CRM implementation in the following three stages:

Year 1: Implementation -- Emphasis on change management, training, support and insuring a successful launch

Year 2: Acceptance -- Performance and application tuning to improve usage, increased functionality around core activities of trade funds management and sales reporting

Year 3: Accuracy -- Leverage the available data to make more accurate decisions.

Live Performance

Bayer went live with Siebel in November 1999. The initial rollout consisted of promotion planning and trade funds management modules. Sales reporting was deployed in August 2000. Since the initial roll out, Bayer has been constantly upgrading or adding additional functions to its system and this year the company plans to add Siebel Analytics to the CRM mix.

Alas, even with detailed planning, Bayer encountered a number of difficulties during the implementation process, partially because the company was an early adopter of the technology, according to Rob Huckfeldt, manager of e-commerce for Bayer.

"Finding internal resources with the proper skills to develop and maintain the new system was important," says Huckfeldt. "In addition, building interfaces with back-end systems and reconciliation procedures was key to our success."

The knowledge transfer in the project was a challenge according to Jeffrey Howren, manager of sales information at Bayer HealthCare. Two major obstacles included funds management and setting up promotions and sales reporting. The latter area alone includes 34 reports for users to choose from.

Getting Involved

Both Huckfeldt and Howren agree that getting users involved from the beginning is the key to CRM acceptance and success.

"We planned our rollout incrementally. We gave our users something new every quarter or every few months to keep them interested," says Howren.

The strategy worked but also provided internal challenges to the IT department. When the consulting partners finished the project, the company scrambled to develop internal resources to support the new project.

"That's the nature of CRM," says Huckfeldt. "It is always deeply embedded in the business and it is a challenge to support."

Founded in 1873, Brauerei Beck & Co. is one of the world's leading exporters of beers. To better serve its worldwide customer base, the company sought an integrated CRM system to increase customer loyalty, reduce costs of order processing, and better seize cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

In response, Beck's tested the CRM waters by creating a business-to-customer Internet shop with a Consumer Telephony Integration (CTI) enabled customer interaction center based on SAP's mySAP CRM. The tool enables real-time availability checks, contract management, billing management, fulfillment visibility, and order tracking. In addition, mySAP CRM offers customer care capabilities across numerous channels like customer interaction centers, Web-based customer self-service capabilities, service and claims management, field service and dispatch and installed-base management.

Previously, Beck's sold its company merchandise, such as t-shirts, caps and sunglasses through a Web site maintained by the brewer's advertising agency, but the ordering process was inefficient. In fact, Beck's did not compile purchasers' addresses from Web inquires. Orders were printed out, mailed to the Beck's offices, and sent to customers from that particular location.

Since March 2003, the e-commerce and interaction center capabilities of mySAP CRM have been tightly linked with enterprise-wide business processes at Beck's. The gradual integration of the CRM solution into the company's SAP R/3 software on the back-end now streamlines the order fulfillment process from procurement to distribution and payments.

Web-site Success

In its first two weeks, Beck's Web-shop garnered 400 online registrations and 300 purchase orders. The deployment served as the template for a Web shop for the Haake Beck brand and for future Web shops in other countries. Based on the success of its Web-shop, Beck's is using the program's campaign management, channel management and analytics tools to collaborate with partners, target special offers and promotions to customers and evaluate the success of marketing and online activities.

"We want to identify buying patterns,"says Oliver Braun, brand manager of Beck's Germany. "We'll be doing a lot of research over the next six months."