Clariant measures what matters with integrated CRM

Pigment supplier Clariant learnt from earlier mistakes when measuring up Crossware CRM - and it is already improving business...

When the New Zealand subsidiary of Swiss company Clariant invested in a dud customer relationship management (CRM) system, the experience could have been a complete waste of time and money.

Instead, the supplier of colour “masterbatches” — or precisely formulated pigments — to the plastics industry learned from its initial mistake and knew exactly what it wanted from a replacement CRM.

For its second CRM attempt Clariant chose Crossware CRM, which IT manager Dave Davies says has provided almost exactly what the company wanted.

“Crossware CRM has met 99% of our requirements, and the other 1% we’re busy customising at the moment,” says Davies.

The company, with its New Zealand head office and production facility in Albany and warehouse in Panmure, sells pigment products to about 200 plastics industry customers.

After the initial CRM misstep, it went looking for a system that tied in with its Lotus Notes messaging platform (a key failing of the original system), that would readily capture data, that was easy to use and that would provide a platform for a customer service improvement drive, known within the company as Opportunity to Improve (OTI).

“We wanted something that integrated with Notes so that if you sent an email it would be captured in the CRM system,” Davies says.

Crossware CRM, as a Notes-based system, is “excellent from that point of view”, he says.

It also scores highly in ease-of-use, with the company’s managing director quick to adopt it to gain oversight of the sales process, enabling him to provide his chemistry expertise to help clinch deals.

As well as recording interactions between sales staff and customers, the system has a built in workflow engine for resolving issues.

“If there is an issue with delivery, say, or colour, there are standard procedures that the system steps the user through in regard to who is notified and what the resolution is,” says Crossware senior consultant Kalev Vaigro, who was in charge of the Clariant project.

“There are different steps for dealings with customers, with suppliers and for monitoring internal health and safety processes.”

Another of the criteria for the CRM system was that it interface with Clariant’s SyteLine ERP system, which Davies says is accomplished by a twice-daily transfer of database changes into the CRM.

The final 1% of functionality that Crossware is working on is to track colour-matching requests.

Clariant customers frequently ask the company to provide a match for a particular colour, which can be costly to undertake.

The industry norm “strike rate” for turning colour-matching requests into product sales is about 30%, which Davies says Clariant would like to do better at.

“Sometimes we get informal feedback from the customer but other times we just don’t know why there was no resulting order.”

Crossware CRM will be used to formalise the process, so the company can improve its strike rate.

“Sales people will be prompted by a workflow to get feedback so we know why there was no order. It could be that the colour was wrong, or too expensive, or that we’ve supplied a number of colour matches and they’ve made an order from just one.

“That will be quite useful because we might end up changing our colour-matching process, becoming more picky about what we do, or it might be another tool sales reps can use to get a customer to place an order.”

Clariant New Zealand’s successful Crossware CRM implementation has prompted eight Asian Clariant businesses to follow suit.

“People in the region heard what we were doing, came and had a look at it and now it’s being rolled out to just about every masterbatches site in Asia,” Davies says.

If part of the success is down to the company’s initial bad CRM experience — “we were clear on what we wanted because we knew what we didn’t want” — Davies also credits the role of Crossware’s Vaigro as pivotal.

“He was our business analyst and programmer so the communication was very good and he has always delivered exactly what he promised. The golive date was met, for instance, and from that point of view it has been superb working with him.”

From the initial requirements analysis to delivery of the CRM took Crossware about three months.

The result is a system that has been willingly taken to by nearly half of Clariant New Zealand’s 65 staff, and which has established itself as vital to the company’s performance.

“Our most important system is our ERP system — if that stops we can’t make anything, we can’t sell anything, we can’t do anything. But the CRM system is the second most important that we run, without a doubt.

“If you don’t measure something you can’t improve it, and that’s what Crossware CRM allows us to do.”

FOR MORE INFO//

CROSSWARE
www.crossware.co.nz

Paul Graham
General Manager
Ph +64 9 379 7044

11/05/10_ex_m_h_nl

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