Swisscom Hospitality Services Plus: For Five-Star Business Processes

Professional CRM ensures global commitment

“For our Account Managers in Europe and the United States there was no real transparency in relation to customer business processes”, explains Claudia Wenzl, Project Manager at Swisscom Hospitality Service Plus, describing the situation that existed at the start of 2006. We needed to optimise Customer Relationship Management on the basis of more efficient processes for the typical business requirements of our sales teams, including contract and contact management as well as proposal and service management. Account Managers were regularly forced to spend valuable time and money on the phone to the Call Centre trying to obtain business-critical information about the clientele in the hotel industry. ”This was simply inefficient”, says Wenzl.

On-demand versus open source

This was clearly an unacceptable state of affairs for a global service provider whose business success is closely linked with the ability to make fast operational decisions. “We were looking for a solution that would give our sales people a 360° view of the customer, no matter where they were in the world”, explains the Project Manager.

One of the biggest challenges lay in combining the existing back-office business processes based on proprietary open source solutions with the customer-oriented processes in marketing, sales and support, using a consolidated IT architecture.

After a lengthy definition phase for existing processes, two possible approaches emerged in the requirements specification devised by the IT process strategists. One was a solution based on open source technology and SugarCRM, and the other was the on-demand software from salesforce.com. According to Wenzl: “One of the main reasons we decided to go with salesforce.com was the expected short implementation time.”

salesforce.com also had an impressive concept for process integration, which was implemented successfully with the help of a Swiss business partner (menticorp AG).

The process model developed was implemented using an open source-based integration platform.

Important customer information is now available to all sales people in real time, while customer-oriented processes can be controlled in real time.

In cases where all of the relevant data was previously distributed across multiple applications, therefore making it difficult to manage, implementation of the Salesforce solution has made it possible to reduce the level of administrative effort required.

Business processes spanning multiple applications can now be managed using a graphical monitor.

The first positive results came after a short and essentially trouble-free implementation period, which involved adapting salesforce.com to the specific process and user interface requirements.

Closed business processes were created for marketing, sales and service along with fast and cost-effective provisioning and finance processes.

To provide sales teams with improved access to the financial information for their customers (billing status, payment history, etc.), the financial software Navision was also integrated into the Salesforce customer processes.

The greatest added value, however, was provided by the Salesforce reporting solution. This solution, which is based on controlled access, lets sales employees and management obtain an overview of the current sales pipeline or check the current billing status using real-time dashboards. Every sales team member is therefore using the same source of information and is at the same time up-to-date with details of all current leads, opportunities and new customers, which can be integrated into all statistics in Salesforce automatically.

In addition to greater efficiency in sales and faster and more cost-effective processes, there has also been a marked improvement with respect to the visibility of all customer-relevant processes. The success of the Salesforce solution is also evident in the high level of user acceptance.

Says Wenzl: “Both users and management are extremely satisfied with the solution.” Around 90 users and “half an administrator” are currently using the future-proof solution provided by salesforce.com.

AppExchange: Fit for future requirements

Looking to the future, the decision by the management in Geneva in favour of on-demand CRM with Salesforce provides plenty of scope for new challenges. With AppExchange, the world’s first on-demand marketplace for web-based business applications, Swisscom Hospitality Services Plus will in the future have access to more than 600 on-demand applications covering all business divisions, including solutions for campaign management, online marketing and mass mailings.

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