Bell Canada's Phenomenal Success with CRM

There is a lot of negative information about CRM right now that is flooding the news. However the success rates are equally high. CRM is definitely a strategy that can be implemented

effectively and successfully. CRM caters to companies of varied sizes. It helps focus on different problems and solutions. Statistics show that there are clear cases of excellence in CRM implementations that can be found right across a whole range of different industries. Research indicates that organizations can clearly measure the return they received from the implementation. What is important to note is that cases of past CRM failures are not in a position to judge the entire CRM technology. Research shows that a CRM success story is easy to find.

Some of the companies whose CRM implementation has been successful include:

Canon (Japan)
AMD
Hitachi
Nokia
Engage
Pepsi Americas
Sovereign Bank
HP

What most of these companies had was a clear idea of all their business processes. They understood their business needs before implementing CRM. They had managed to identify leaders and the best performers in the organization. They have also managed to involve key executives at the highest level and get the message to everyone in the organization about the importance of CRM.

Bell Canada's Success

Bell Canada is easily Canada's largest communications company and a CRM success story. It boasts of almost 28 million customer connections and manages to provide some of the most comprehensive communication services. These services aside from being innovative have also been a source of stability to residential and business customers in the Canadian region.

The company basically serves to provide their customers with solutions that smack of ease of integration and simplicity to their customers. They basically cater to all their customers' communication requirements like the telephone, internet, wireless, voice over IP and digital television. They try to provide information and technology for communications to top business enterprises within the Canadian region and beyond. They cater to a variety of organizations ranging from the small and mediocre enterprises to the large corporates. Small and medium industries have benefited immensely from their services. Their services include internet access, data services, voice services, wireless services, satellite television, long distance phone services etc.

Since customer needs are growing Bell is currently trying to simplify the existing processes and introduce bundled services by moving towards a single, bill. It manages an extensive local access network providing local and long distance phone services to customers.

It also enables the provision of a wide range of services for consumers. Bell's phone services include call display, call waiting, voice mail etc. A classic example of CRM success is that which Bell Canada found. Its successful implementation of CRM saw profound results in just 2 months.

Pre - CRM Scenario

The solutions, business processes and methods being employed prior to the CRM solution clearly did not fulfill or meet any of the business needs. Bell Canada needed a full fledged customer centric strategy that was catering to the company requirements. After scrutiny they embarked on the implementation of CRM and decided that they will opt for its advantages.

They basically encountered a problem that the existing disparate solutions created a lot of extra work for employees and basically increased the task load. This had resulted in a decrease in employee satisfaction and posed numerous problems. In addition to this BELL required its front and back end operations of its shared services centre to be integrated. This step could not be achieved through existing processes. Also the access to current employee case status and the reporting capabilities was required. All this led to the installation of CRM solutions.

Implementing CRM

The result was that CRM customer service & support initiatives were availed of. The CRM benefits were deployed to a total of 200+ users in 2 months. The staff was trained in the ability to use multi language systems; This helped them immensely especially when dealing with multi lingual customers and customer data. The key elements employed in the implementation were speed, data integration, and easy usage and increased efficient reporting capabilities.

The Result?

What did BELL ultimately witness? The result was increased and better customer service from employees amongst almost seven groups. Another advantage was the internal efficiency that was created within the organization. The flexibility and customization traits of CRM enabled a reduction in the total case volume.

The ease of usage and its adaptability also resulted in an increase in the integration of data between the systems. The main point to note here is the fact that the entire implementation required very little time and was carried out with very little effort. Speed was a dominating factor in this implementation. The organization was able to acquire the business requirements it needed so much.

It's imminently clear that focusing on the failure rate of CRM is the wrong approach. Organizations need to focus more on the 'CRM success story'. What's needed most is being able to focus on the success rate and get the most out of the CRM implementation by employing the right practices prior, during and after the CRM implementation.

Canons CRM's Success Soars
DHL's Phenomenal Success with CRM
Implementing CRM Pays - Success Stories
Travelex's Phenomenal Success with CRM

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