Cutting out complexity

Converged communications provider Internet Solutions (IS) recently disposed of its ageing Siebel 6.0 CRM system in its entirety and implemented Siebel 7.8 from scratch.

The reason for the 'forklift upgrade', says IS CRM project manager Chris Turner, is that the existing system had been substantially customised over the years, to the point of being something of a mess, and because the business had changed and the system no longer met the company's needs.

Says Turner: "The main business drivers behind the change were that Siebel had stopped supporting the product, the business had outgrown it and it was overly-customised and not realistic to maintain.

"The system is core to IS," comments Turner. "It is a main strategic initiative and it has been implemented across the entire value chain to ensure we have a 360-degree view of the customer that's remained elusive [to CRM implementers in general]. From sales to order management, to provisioning and support, our Siebel system spans all relevant divisions, functional areas and geographic locations, so we have customer information available at all phases of the value chain."

Turner was brought on board specifically to drive the initiative. "The first thing I did when I started on the IS CRM project was to cut non-core functionality to our phase-one objectives. Many people try to achieve utopia on the first pass. Enterprise CRM systems such as Siebel are way too broad for this, not to mention the training and change management hurdles.

"Further," says Turner, "I've always tried to resist temptation to customise as much as is possible. There are no prizes for pimping your million-rand best-of-breed CRM software, and for good reason. We have only done extensive development where the functionality was key and did not exist in Siebel, such as our order provisioning process."

In line with the famous GIGO truism, notes Turner, "good data is critical to the effectiveness of any CRM system. We paid particular attention to data cleansing and migration in the project, and this will be an ongoing process."

The company has also put in place a set of metrics to measure the project's success; it's measuring customer satisfaction via outbound call surveys, service request first response and resolution time, sales pipeline duration, and opportunity conversion rate as well as order and provisioning efficiency.

In terms of tweaking the system to ensure it stays relevant to the company's requirements, Turner says: "We also use our Siebel system to perform the internal help-desk and enhancement logging functions. Enhancement requests are reviewed and if deemed to be in line with our strategy, they are either scheduled for inclusion in a future maintenance release or included with a future project."

There are no prizes for pimping your million-rand best-of-breed CRM software.

Chris Turner, CRM project manager, Internet Solutions

Says Andrew Procter, CIO of IS: "The new platform required a substantial investment by IS and this is not about to stop. In the fast-paced and increasingly crowded telco industry, it is no longer good enough to have the latest products - customers are becoming increasingly sensitive to service levels."

Turner adds: "The nature of the telecoms industry requires our CRM system to be scaleable, flexible and tightly integrated with billing and OSS systems. With phase one, we have implemented a company-wide, multifunctional platform on which to build our future needs to better serve our customers."

Phase one also included integration with 24 other systems using SOA principles, replacement of various bespoke systems with Siebel functionality, parallel provisioning, the ability to change orders on the fly, enhanced workflow and efficient reporting.

Some of the items next on the IS CRM agenda include closed-loop campaigns functionality, analytics - end-user customisable dashboards of KPIs, predictive modelling to decrease churn, increase cross- and up-sell opportunities, pre-release new products to certain users in order to monitor and feedback to product development, and incentive compensation management (for the sales teams).

"Our plan is to leverage the investment and focus on the business benefits," says Turner. "You can't implement a system and leave it; it doesn't work because you have to continually fine-tune it based on customer behaviour."

It is between the different products and systems that you will find your customer sweet spot.