Prefabricated building industry
Hardly any industry faces so many customer complaints as prefabricated building manufacturers.
Viewing customer complaints as an opportunity for further collaboration instead of as a threat is one of the most important tasks within successful complaint management.
The problem:
The information for the acquisition, order processing, acceptance phase was recorded partly in Excel and partly in an ERP system. The response time for customer service when clarifying a complaint far exceeded the time for competitors.
The challenge:
the legal department must hold weekly meetings with the departments involved in order to objectively assess customer complaints as the information about customer orders or customer agreements is either in the employees’ mail databases or stored locally on the computers of the employees involved. It is often the case that not all of the information is available at the meeting, so employees in the legal department have to follow up by telephone. Things become critical when the employees involved are on holiday.
Solution
Introduction of a CRM system with a customer complaint module in an existing ERP system
In collaboration with selected key users from Sales, Marketing, Production, Assembly, IT and Customer Service, a project was drawn up to specify the requirements on the CRM components of the existing ERP system. The following activities are implemented in collaboration with the team until the project is completed:
- Creation of an investment plan as the basis of project approval by the executive board
- Creation of a specification as the basis for a workload estimate for the IT department
- Creation of the documentation for the application cases that are mapped in the CRM system and used as the basis for employee training
- Creation of the test specification for the acceptance of the specified requirements
- Creation of a data migration matrix to adopt existing data from Excel and other programs
- Creation of a training plan to train employees after acceptance
- Creation of a training plan for the IT first-level support for the period after the software is commissioned.
The result:
it was possible to reduce response times for clarifying the legal validity of customer complaints by 75%. Customers were informed very quickly about the way forward. Positive feedback from customers on the Internet about customer service has noticeably increased.
