Aamcom: Achieving Continuity and Accountability Across the Sales and Client Management Teams
17 May, 2010
By: Avidian TechnologiesCase study findings have not been verified by Contact Professional and are solely the findings of the contributor.
Aamcom is a contract telephone customer service provider. Their call center services allow their clients to be freed from the phone operationally and dedicate more of their focus to core business needs. Whether their clients are away from the office, experiencing too many incoming calls or are simply always in need of a live person to answer the phone day or night, Aamcom's goal is to enhance its clients' telephone customer service levels. Founded in 1957 and based in Redondo Beach, Calif., Aamcom has grown to 50 employees spread across two locations with a network of employees also working remotely.
Challenges
Customer service is the name of the game for Aamcom. After all, they’re in the business of servicing their customers’ customers. As such, it is a mission critical goal for them to have excellent relationships with their own clients as a means of demonstrating their ability to provide the highest level of customer support.
“Customer service is our job,” said Steve Diels, president of Aamcom. “If we don’t show our clients our ability to manage our own client relationships, how can they trust us to manage their customers’ relationships with them?”
However, with the patchwork of in-house solutions Aamcom was using to track clients and their needs, Aamcom found they had gaps in their communication with clients. The customer service team, sales team, new service team and past service teams all had different databases, causing confusion and a lack of continuity.
“We were constantly stepping on each other’s toes,” Diels said. ”One person was doing the same thing someone else had already done because no one had visibility into the entire pipeline. It was like a really disorganized fast food restaurant where everyone behind the counter was constantly bumping into each other and getting in everyone else’s way.”
That’s when Aamcom decided the pieced together pseudo-customer relationship management (CRM) solutions they were using weren’t making the grade. They also realized that they needed to have a better means of measuring the success of their sales and current client management teams, thereby increasing accountability. Management would often ask employees to reach out to X number of clients in order to probe for known issues so Aamcom could then solve the problems, but they had no way to track whether or not the goals were actually met. They operated solely off of assumptions and trust.
Solution
Aamcom knew what they needed: a simple to implement, unified solution that would allow them to connect the dots across all their clients and increase accountability among employees. They investigated several CRM tools, including solutions from Goldmine, Salesforce, Telemagic, Microsoft and Avidian Technologies. Aamcom’s primary concerns were cost, scalability, trainability and deployability.
“As a call center, we have experience with a lot of telecommunications software tools and we know how easy it was to buy a tool and then never have it get used,” Diels said. “We wanted to make sure the CRM software we bought was deployable. Also, some of the solutions we investigated were deployable, but the cost to customize and then train employees was too high. Some of the others were simply too complex to deploy.”
After thorough analysis, Aamcom selected Avidian’s Prophet CRM solution, as it met Aamcom’s needs perfectly.
“Prophet simply stood out above the rest in terms of deployability,” Diels said. “Prophet plugs into Microsoft Outlook, essentially adding all the CRM features right into a program employees were already using all day long. We felt this would make it very easy to deploy and practically guarantee that employees would actually use it. We also thought this would require a lot less training than a solution that has a completely different interface and feature set.”
In addition, Avidian would be able to customize the solution to meet Aamcom’s specific needs at an affordable price.
Implementation
Aamcom rolled out Prophet in a four to six week time frame. This allowed the necessary time to train employees on a limited set of new functionalities each week, giving them the opportunity to try each new feature before moving on to the next.
“The implementation went pretty smoothly,” Diels said. “There was one point when we discovered that Prophet didn’t do something we thought it would, but Avidian’s support staff jumped on the issue and was able to customize our version of Prophet so it did exactly what we wanted it to. It was a pretty painless process.”
Aamcom has been up and running on Prophet for more than a year now and the new solution has already created tangible results. Since implementing the solution, Aamcom has seen a 12 percent increase in sales. In addition, their entire sales and client management process is running much more smoothly.
“Thanks to Prophet, everyone is now connected to each other,” Diels said. “Employees can see what has already been done with each client so now people aren’t repeating the same things over and over. There have definitely been fewer repeated mistakes.”
In addition, Diels has noticed a happier work environment, meaning Prophet has benefited the organization and the individual.
“Because there’s more accountability created by Prophet’s reporting capabilities, our sales and client management people have more pride in their work,” Diels said. “Employees are now taking a more proactive approach to their work and when they leave at the end of the day, they look back and say, ‘I got a lot done today.’”
