The Company

Established in 1977, the Mariners have six different business areas that deal with fans, customers and corporate sponsors (sales, marketing, service, support, community relations and event management). Early in the baseball franchise’s history, many customer  service and sales personnel knew season ticket holders, corporate sponsors and other key clients by name.

The Challenge

Over time, the organization witnessed an enormous growth in its customer base, which subsequently required a more formalized means of tracking customers. All six departments that have direct customer contact developed individual customer database. The unintentional result was that key customer information lay scattered throughout the organization.

The Solution

By implementing Onyx Customer Portal and Onyx Employee Portal, the Mariners have the potential to set the standard of customer service for all of Major League Baseball. Providing a gracious customer experience is an important means to help grow ticket sales in today’s increasingly competitive sports entertainment market.

Why Onyx?

The team wanted a system that could be customized to the customer service and product sales needs of their organization – and which would also offer a future path that could keep pace with the organization’s technology direction. “We visited all of the major league teams that were using Onyx, and we could see that the software could meet our present needs and grow exactly as we need it to,” says Frances Traisman, manager of customer communications and senior account executive. Read more »

“Contactual’s solution had us up and running in just minutes. It was intuitive enough for my agents to quickly learn how to use the application without extensive training and, most importantly, the features actually worked.”  (Customer Success Story)

Based in Port Angeles, WA, Call Centers 24×7® offers contact center services for companies  across the US. Call Centers 24×7® employs a “distributed rural workforce model” using many small call centers in rural areas of the United States, supplemented by people working from home. With this unique structure, Call Centers 24×7® requires an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use on-demand contact center solution.

There are many factors that need to be in place to allow a business to not only survive, but to expand and thrive. Since Call Centers 24×7’s business is directly tied to its ability to accurately and efficiently handle calls, it is vital that they implement a reliable contact center solution. Call Centers 24×7® now relies on Contactual OnDemand Contact Center for accurate call, email, and web chat routing, as well as monitoring and reporting.

According to Call Centers 24×7® CEO Shane Miller, “Our business model calls for a distributed, rural workforce. With Contactual, my people only need a phone and browser, and they can be up-and-running with a few simple clicks. That’s it. No trips to datacenters, no servers to configure. It’s easier than any other on-premise or on-demand solution. Best of all, it actually works.” Read more »

CRM in Action: ProfitLinc and Entellium

When Billy Shepherd took over leadership as executive vice president at ProfitLinc, he knew that managing telecom expenses and assets for his midsize company clients should have two common themes: simple and seamless. Telecom expenses are often one of the top three line items on a large company’s expense sheet, and ProfitLinc’s mission is to make telecom contract, invoice and asset management easy and worry free for their clients. This is why, when Shepherd took a look at ProfitLinc’s internal systems, he couldn’t justify the cumbersome, expensive CRM system in place at the time of his arrival.

Starting Over
To maximize the return on every dollar a client spends on telecom, ProfitLinc must pay critical attention to detail. Whether it’s reviewing contracts from many different carriers or maintaining accurate asset inventory for clients, the core of ProfitLinc’s customer service lies in its ability to keep every line item, every contract and every expense in perfect order. When Shepherd realized that fundamental CRM details were lacking in their current system, he turned to Entellium’s eSalesForce to start sales and marketing contact management anew.

“I conducted a direct-mail marketing campaign that I couldn’t run a simple report on without buying an additional application from a third party,” Shepherd said. “That’s when I knew it was time to make a change and start over with Entellium.”

The change was a good one for ProfitLinc. As a result, the company can now handle a wide range of reporting tasks. “The reporting is so simple,” he said. “I can administer and post information with ease.”

The intuitive nature of Entellium’s eSalesforce also caught Shepherd’s eye. “The ‘What Would You Like to Do?’ feature in eSalesForce keeps me on track when I’m moving through the system. When I’m done with one task, it takes me directly into the next without any guessing. It’s like ongoing training that I enjoy daily.”

Read more »

CRM In Action

In Orlando’s highly competitive vacation market, it’s not good enough to have great values in home rentals—you have to deliver the best customer service, too. For Florida Leisure Vacation Home Rentals and Sales, delivering the level of service they wanted was becoming increasingly labor and time intensive.

Florida Leisure manages an inventory of more than 65 privately owned, luxurious 3-7 bedroom homes all,with private heated swimming pools. Unlike the typical time-share or villa setting, Florida Leisure’s properties are spread out over 4 or 5 of the most desirable neighborhoods in Orlando surrounding Walt Disney World and other tourist attractions.

The company manages rentals when the homeowners are not using the properties or if they rent them out themselves, so maintaining excellent communications with the owners and maintaining an up-to-the-minute database of availabilities is critical.

Poor Access to Information

As Florida Leisure gathered more information about their owners and renters, they found it increasingly difficult to produce reports that provided the access they needed to the data.“We had been using Access for our database, and it just wasn’t working out for what we needed,” said Florida Leisure Marketing Director Cathy Goonen. “We have an online booking engine through Rent One Online, so our customers can either go through our Web site to book homes directly or they can call us and we will place the reservation through Rent One Online.

“We take that information and put it in a backup database so that we can capture customer information and history to use for marketing purposes and customer service. We were trying to do that via Access and it just wasn’t giving us the information we needed.

We weren’t able to sort it the way we needed it, we weren’t able to get the reports we needed and it wasn’t user friendly at all.” Goonen began to search for a new solution that would give them the reporting and data retrieval they needed to manage their business.

She reviewed five server- or Web-based solutions and settled on Entellium eSalesForce. “We’re a small office with 65 homes, and we’re responsible for all the administrative work, training and follow up. We needed a tool that could automate a lot of the reporting that we were trying to do by hand. Of all of them that I checked out, Entellium was by far the most user friendly. It was the easiest for us to understand and integrate existing information from the Access system.” Read more »

CRM in Action: Big River Telephone

To keep its large customer base loyal (in the notoriously competitive telecommunications industry), Big River Telephone decided that it must integrate its back-office and customer-facing functions, and gain centralized control over both areas.

A Focused Implementation and Customization Phase
Working side-by-side with its Sage SalesLogix business partner, Big River examined several leading CRM solutions, ultimately selecting Sage SalesLogix.

“We looked at other software, but only Sage SalesLogix met our needs,” said Kevin Cantwell, President, Big River Telephone Company.

Big River’s business partner led the implementation process, installing Sage SalesLogix suite and integrating it with Microsoft Outlook and Sage MAS 90 ERP in only 90 days. After the initial implementation, Big River’s developers were able to take over and further customize the solution, as a result of the partner’s expert guidance.

Now, Sage SalesLogix resides at the core of Big River Telephone’s business. From sales opportunity management to ongoing customer support and targeted retention marketing, Big River utilizes the solution’s broad functionality to handle all stages of customer relationship management.

Improved Productivity, Customer Service, and Reporting
The new solution has enabled Big River to vastly improve employee productivity and effectiveness. For example, before the implementation, Big River needed six customer service representatives to cover its support lines. Now, using Sage SalesLogix, five representatives perform the same work, but with fewer customer complaints and faster resolution times.

As Cantwell described, “Because Sage SalesLogix delivers up-to-the-minute information, the customer service experience turns out positive, even if there’s a perceived ‘negative’ reason for the call. We know the exact status of that person’s account and how to help them.”

During an outage last year, Big River took advantage of Sage SalesLogix Support to perform critical damage control. They used the solution to e-mail 300 inconvenienced customers and explain the situation, even providing updates every 15 minutes. Once the problem had been resolved, support reps called each customer personally. As a result of these swift and primarily automated efforts, Big River Telephone managed the crisis without losing a single customer.

Read more »

CRM In Action: Infor and CryptoLogic

Focused on integrity and innovation, CryptoLogic Inc. is a world-leading developer and supplier of Internet gaming software. CryptoLogic’s leadership in regulatory compliance makes it one of the few companies with gaming software that is certified to strict standards similar to land-based gaming.

As a provider of one of the most extensive Internet gaming solutions, CryptoLogic-developed software powers one of the largest poker rooms on the Internet and offers more than 260 online casino games and multiplayer bingo games, all in multiple languages and currencies. The company also offers back-office, player, and marketing support services to its customers.

As an international leader in online gaming, CryptoLogic operates in one of the most regulated industries. The company must provide solutions and services that both support its customers’ business growth objectives and meet the wide range of stringent government regulations that exist in most countries.

The business results of CryptoLogic are closely intertwined with the business results of its licensees. “Much of our revenue is based on the volume of online gaming activity that our licensees can achieve,” explains Patrick Siconolfi, manager, CRM Solutions, CryptoLogic. “Because of this, we have even more of a vested interest in seeing that our licensees succeed than most companies.”

In working with its licensees to optimize their marketing programs, CryptoLogic found many areas for improvement. “We found that their marketing dollars weren’t being spent as effectively as possible,” he says. “Many of our licensees were giving promotions to players who didn’t represent the most value to them.”

To correct this situation, CryptoLogic knew that it needed to implement an advanced customer relationship management solution that would help better segment players and do it in an a way that was efficient. The new solution also would need to provide analytics and reporting capabilities so CryptoLogic’s licensees could understand the results from marketing initiatives and continually improve their campaigns.

Getting Business Specific
CryptoLogic chose to implement Infor™ CRM Epiphany® Outbound Marketing to enhance its marketing product suite. “We purchased the Infor solution primarily to make our licensees’ marketing dollars go further and, ultimately, to make them more successful,” Siconolfi explains. “Of all the solutions available, Outbound Marketing clearly offered the best combination of advanced outbound marketing functionality, scalability, and ease of use.”

Read more »

Fastened to the Future

For most consumers, the fastener aisle at the local hardware store—with its hundreds of screws, nuts, bolts and washers— is daunting enough. For Uneeda Bolt & Screw Company, that miniscule inventory hardly represents a sample.

Family-owned Uneeda Bolt & Screw was founded in 1954 in a New York City sub-basement. In its current 40,000-square-foot warehouse just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, the company is a one-stop supplier for more than 4,000 commercialcustomers. The company sells more than 80,000 specific items, adds 30-50 new items every day and carries an inventory of more than six billion quality fasteners.

In addition to being an authorized distributor of premium brands like Apex, ACT, POP, Marson, Recoil, Brass Craft, Heyco and DTI, the company has built its reputation on the ability to produce custom products in virtually any quantity using any material. Its computerized system can match all painting and powder coatings, and its electronic bagging and boxing equipment can create a wide variety of customized packaging, including instruction sheets, custom labels and bar codes.

“It’s a very complex business,” said Ron Tantillo, the company’s Director of Sales. “It’s not just ‘Here’s a screw.’ There may be two different screws and the only difference between them is the spacing in the threads. That’s a huge difference.”

Falling Through the Cracks

Managing a business this complex takes an extraordinary amount of attention to details. When Tantillo joined the company, he realized the CRM software the company was using was not up to the task.

Read more »

“For any entertainment company, whether a sports team or not, NetSuite makes perfect sense,” says Stewart. “It lets you really understand your customers and their buying habits, which lets you better serve them while building your own business.”

–Cameron Stewart, Interactive Marketing Manager for the A’s

CRM in Action: Oakland Athletics

With the 2005 baseball season in full swing, it may be too early to tell how the Oakland Athletics will fare on the field—but off the diamond, the results are clear: With NetSuite CRM providing a more efficient, flexible way to track sales, the team has been able to improve customer—and advertiser—satisfaction, while laying the groundwork for improved marketing campaigns and bigger sales.

In just six months, the A’s have been able to better manage and track sales leads, and reduce the errors that were an embarrassing side-effect of its old paper-based sales system. “We no longer have different sales representatives calling the same leads, and with NetSuite’s reporting capabilities, we get a real-time look at what’s selling and who is buying it,” says Cameron Stewart, Interactive Marketing Manager for the A’s. “Before, it took so long to compile data that everything was always out-of-date.” Read more »

“Our due diligence revealed that the Aplicor product had enough functionality to automate our relatively complex sales and marketing processes, at a price point that was reasonable for us.”

– Joe Majestic, chief technical officer, Synovus

CRM in Action: Synovus
The best way to illustrate how CRM can best address mid-market needs is to examine, in detail, a mid-market firm that’s using CRM successfully.

For this purpose, we’ve selected Synovus, a multi-service holding company headquartered in Georgia, which uses Aplicor to handle its sales and marketing processes. Synovus, which delivers banking, investment and asset management services through a network of banks and offices in the southeastern U.S., controls a little over $30 billion in assets. At first glance, that might not seem like a “mid-market” amount of money until one compares those assets with those of, say, Bank of America Corp., whose assets exceed $1.4 trillion.

As is typical for a mid-market firm in an industry where large industries dominate, Synovus is the antithesis of its larger competitors. Bank of America and its ilk are highly centralized, with worldwide branches that are as cookie-cutter as a Starbucks franchise. By contrast, Synovus consists of 43 separately branded banking institutions that operate autonomously within their respective communities through approximately 325 branch offices.

This decentralized concept allows Synovus’s banks to continue to position themselves as locally-deployed, thus offering customers the responsiveness that comes with local decision-making. At the same time, being part of a larger organization allows those autonomous banks to offer a wide array of financial products that otherwise would only be available from a multi-billion dollar holding company. “We’re trying to achieve the best of both worlds,” says Joe Majestic, the chief technical officer for Synovus’s Financial Management Services division.
Read more »

At A Glance
Company: RLE Technologies
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Industry: Manufacturing
Challenges: RLE needed an integrated, Web-based solution for sales order processing, CRM and help desk functionality with an intuitive user interface

Before turning to NetSuite in February, RLE Technologies - which manufactures water leak detection and web-enabled monitoring products - found itself in an IT quandary. The company had been using Great Plains software with its pervasive database; however, with Microsoft’s recent efforts to migrate users to SQL Server and .Net, RLE was facing massive upgrade costs.

Read more »