Orion Telecom has developed a Customer Relationship Management system in-house, integrating diverse systems and interfaces to provide its team with a 360 degree view of the client. By doing it this way, they have preserved their database investment and created a uniquely powerful set of tools that facilitate the best possible client service for this industry.
The core project objectives were to create as single CRM platform for all of Orion`s services, to profile clients correctly, to facilitate highly effective and relevant client communications and to process client queries in much shorter time-scales.
"We knew it was risky to go out and start our own development," said Tim Wood, Orion`s IS Manager, "but when we spec`d the system and looked at what was available on the market, we felt it was best to do the job in-house and have total control and flexibility over it. Now that it is up and running, we are pleased we did it this way."
The system is based on its IT infrastructure in Cape Town and deployed over the thin client network throughout the branches in major centres, available to all staff. Through being able to drill right down to basic elements on the client`s infrastructure, such as looking at individual LCR Routers attached to PABXs, Orion has gained a competitive advantage in its ability to provide instant over-the-phone service to its clients.
Jacques du Toit, National Sales and Marketing director had praise for the developments: "Our development teams have achieved the stated business objectives and more. The system gives us the views we wanted, the reports we wanted and the intervention history we wanted. Its easy to use, anyone can log on and keep it updated and it integrates with all of our business intelligence."
Management, Sales and Technical personnel require different views of the client and while there are some common screens to these three groups, they are designed to make it easiest for each group to carry out client service functions. The system has been developed in such a way that enables Orion to respond to changes in the industry quickly and easily.
For example certain teams perform daily non-usage monitoring and specific views enable this to happen easily, throwing out exception reports when usage goes under low threshold limits set for that client.
The 360 degree view of the client enables sales personnel to manager contacts, industry types, engagements, communications preferences, notes and more while technical personnel track service calls, escalate tickets through the workflow system and have a detailed view of the technical installation on each site. Group account personnel can also manage clients at group level, such as the large banks, insurance houses etc.
Accounts personnel use the system extensively to provide over the phone assistance to clients while technical personnel use it to drill down to PABX types, router technicalities and SIM card details for maintenance.
Anyone with access rights can pull reports such as cost savings, invoices, statements, call details, call statistics, SIM statistics, management reports (sales and technical), project reports and others. The system also has reports which provide efficiency indicators per client in terms of off-net/on-net call ratios and recommends when a particular client may require a different split of SIMs due to specific call patterns.
Du Toit added: "It sounds really clich'ed but customer relationships really do count and we have built our business to where it is today based on passion for service, both at a personal level and at a technical level. Relationships are good when service levels are good - its that simple. Our new system helps us achieve these goals."
The system was developed on a MS SQL Server 2000 platform, homogenizing diverse legacy and new interfaces and applications. All of these integrate directly with the company financials for transparent direct access to information for the sole purpose of providing the best possible customer service in the industry.
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