RIA Compliance Achieves Total CRM Solution, Significantly Cuts Support Costs with HEAT Service & Support and GoldMine
1 Nov, 2004
By: Lori Samolyk"HEAT provided us with a rich and flexible feature set at a price that made sense. When compared to the CRM system we had in place, it provided us the flexibility to customize workflow to our specific business needs rather than costly re-engineering our business to meet the needs of the CRM system."
— Jim Bennight, Vice President, Customer Operations, RIA Compliance
Customer Profile
The Thomson Corp., with 2003 revenues of $7.6 billion, is a global leader in providing integrated information and software-based solutions to business and professional customers. Thomson’s RIA Compliance division provides value-added information, software tools and applications to more than 20 million users in the fields of law, tax, accounting, financial services, higher education, reference information, corporate training and assessment, scientific research and healthcare.
As part of the Thomson Tax & Accounting business of Thomson, RIA is the premier provider of technology and information to tax professionals in accounting firms and corporations, providing industry-leading tax compliance software tools. RIA is headquartered in New York City with offices throughout the United States. The company’s software is used to process some of the nation’s largest and most complex tax returns.
Customers range from Big 4 accounting firms in the professional services market, to 70% of the Fortune 500 firms who in some form or fashion use Thomson software to file tax returns. RIA Compliance maintains a call center in Carrollton, Texas, staffed at 200 seats, where they focus on preparing returns, answering questions, and supporting the company’s many software products. During the peaks of tax season, the company might handle as many as 50,000 customer contacts per month. As the tax season comes to a close, transaction volume can fall to 20,000 customer contacts per month. In contrast to an average call center, all agents in this call center are accountants, CPAs, and MBAs because inbound calls are specifically related to taxes, tax codes and corresponding software.
Business Need
The tax business is all about deadlines—April 15, Sept. 15, Oct. 15 and more. For RIA Compliance’s clients—accounting firms using the software to process complex individual, corporate and partnership tax returns—meeting these deadlines is not optional. As a result, RIA Compliance’s call center faces escalating call volume around its clients’ multiple tax deadlines each year. When clients face questions or problems, RIA Compliance must ensure its agents provide answers and information immediately to meet the customer service demands of its credentialed accounting professionals.
Over the years, Thomson has used a variety of systems to manage its incoming calls. Originally, the company logged calls using a homegrown legacy system. In 1998, Thomson replaced its legacy system with an enterprise-level CRM system in five of its business units, including the RIA Compliance division. The hope was that the new CRM application would meet the growing demands of an increasingly complex customer interaction; unfortunately, RIA soon found that the application would not adequately meet its needs. On top of the significant cost of the software itself, the product required an IT staff of seven full-time employees to maintain, customize and regularly upgrade the system to fit the company’s business practices, which added at least $500,000 in payroll to the annual budget.
In addition to the high costs of purchasing, implementation and maintenance, the new CRM system lacked the speed and stability that RIA Compliance needed to support its customers effectively. Queries to the system (quite common during peak tax deadlines) were difficult and often brought down the system altogether, which had a negative impact on customer service and satisfaction. The problem was so acute that executive approval was required to run queries during peak hours, clearly a burden on all staff. The CRM system also lacked the ability to add simple customizations, such as unique screens for each business unit. The biggest problem the company faced, however, was having to make its processes fit the system’s workflow instead of its own, preventing RIA Compliance from being the world-class call center it aimed to be.
HEAT Service Management Solution
As RIA Compliance considered alternative solutions that would more adequately meet its needs, the company learned that one of the other Thomson divisions, PPC, its 20-seat sister business that offers guidance and tools for accounting and auditing, had elected to install HEAT Service & Support software from FrontRange Solutions. HEAT allowed the PPC division to approach the calls from a customer service perspective and issue trouble tickets to accurately track all requests. Soon after, another business division, FastTax, followed PPC’s lead by implementing the HEAT system.
As RIA Compliance found it increasingly costly to maintain the problematic CRM system, managers started to talk with other divisions about their decision to implement HEAT. The feedback from those divisions clearly indicated that HEAT was a cost-effective alternative, and adding it became an easy decision. According to Jim Bennight, Vice President, Customer Operations, the decision to switch to HEAT came down to cost, customizability and control. In talking with FrontRange Solutions Partner Enterprise Computer Solutions (ECS), he became convinced that HEAT would out-perform the existing system by lowering costs, allowing fast customization, and allowing RIA Compliance to take back control by selecting the workflow that best served its needs.
Staffing Savings
What most impressed RIA Compliance was that the software represented a simpler, yet more powerful solution to the organization’s CRM needs. ECS demonstrated that HEAT would only require one part-time administrator, instead of seven full-time employees. An additional bonus was that the administrator didn’t need to be a programmer, because maintaining and customizing HEAT was as simple as selecting preferences from within a toolkit in the software. The ease of customization would enable that single administrator to make changes to call screens and processes to fit RIA Compliance’s changing needs. And finally, HEAT WebCenter would offer the online capabilities the call center needed to meet its clients’ around-the-clock needs.
“HEAT provided us with a rich and flexible feature set at a price that made sense,” Bennight explained. “When compared to the CRM system we had in place, it provided us the flexibility to customize workflow to our specific business needs rather than costly re-engineering our business to meet the needs of the CRM system.”
HEAT also offered RIA Compliance a new level of control. Because of HEAT’s reputation for stability and powerful reporting, the company felt confident that the new system would provide the reliability it needed to maintain strong customer support. And, HEAT promised powerful reporting capabilities, allowing RIA Compliance to choose from a database of pre-built reports or easily create custom reports using Crystal Reports. Because it already used Crystal in its operations, the company wouldn’t have to spend extra to train its staff on another new program.
Ahead of Schedule
RIA Compliance began the implementation process for HEAT in March 2003. To make its launch deadline of July 1, Bennight thought it would be wise to stick to HEAT’s out-of-the-box functionality. But ECS explained that this functionality actually began with the toolset for customizing screens and workflows. At that point, Bennight knew they’d made the right decision. The software’s simplicity also meant that the support personnel who would use the system could be involved in its setup, instead of high-level programmers, which ensured valuable buy-in for the transition.
“HEAT’s architecture and their toolkit allowed us to involve the very people that were part of the solution, who were using it day to day and implementing it,” Bennight explained. “That falls right into all best-practice management theories you’ve ever read.”
RIA Compliance easily customized the software for their needs, which included a drop-down list of 13,000 items—a daunting task that HEAT performed flawlessly. The combination of HEAT’s out-of-box capabilities and ease of customization, implementation guidance from ECS, and detailed plans and processes resulted in a smooth implementation completed ahead of schedule. On June 1, a month before the target date, the company went live with HEAT without missing a beat.
“Going back to the old system was a $750,000 decision that we really didn’t want to make,” said Bennight, referring to the costs he would have incurred had he not been able to implement on schedule. “The low costs we have for maintaining HEAT are unreal! Now we can think about doing other things because we have more room in the budget. And it’s a higher quality program—not because it’s more complex but because the people using it can understand the tool enough to make the changes and control their destiny.”
24/7 Customer Self-Service
RIA Compliance also implemented HEAT WebCenter solution from FrontRange, which enables customers and technicians to logon and look up customer interaction records and specific trouble tickets online anytime, anywhere. RIA Compliance customers can log and check on their own trouble tickets, without calling the contact center—a very valuable capability for the company’s worldwide client base. For the call center, which aims to take as much as 15 percent of all calls via the web, it provides a way to cut per-call costs by not involving live personnel on each call. WebCenter even allows RIA Compliance to include frequently asked questions that answer customer questions without requiring them to log a trouble ticket.
“WebCenter allows me to support my customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year,” Bennight said. “It’s a market differentiator—something my competition doesn’t offer.”
A Complete CRM Solution
In addition to a need for a web-based solution, the RIA Compliance corporate field sales team had asked for an effective contact management system to help better manage customer relationships. With the success of HEAT, RIA Compliance began examining FrontRange’s GoldMine contact management system, a product that enjoyed a long history of contact management success across a broad range of industries. The powerful implementation of HEAT plus GoldMine allowed RIA Compliance to capitalize on powerful CRM technology.
Today, RIA Compliance uses GoldMine to manage existing and prospective customer contacts. Previously, the complexity of the company’s enterprise CRM system deterred account managers from using it at all, so they resorted to tracking contacts manually and individually using either paper or a spreadsheet. Now, account managers and sales reps have a centralized way to store and access all details about contacts. Plus, with a view into the sales cycle in GoldMine, sales managers can see the efforts of their teams and what’s in the pipeline.
But perhaps the greatest value is the system’s ability to exchange information with HEAT and other RIA Compliance systems. For example, from within GoldMine, an account representative can see any support tickets that have been logged for a customer in HEAT. That’s key customer knowledge to have when contacting a customer about other issues.
GoldMine is also synchronized with the company’s corporate ordering system, enabling sales reps to quickly access names and addresses to complete order forms. And, it’s tied with the corporate imaging system, so account managers can view images of purchase orders, contracts, and other customer documents, important when managing customer and prospect information. Finally with the system’s reminder features, representatives can easily stay on top of customers’ annual renewal times, and account managers know every interaction the company has with a customer.
"With GoldMine, all documents and communication are available and accessible from one location, which saves time for multiple departments,” said Sherri Minter, Senior Manager of Business Systems.
Summary
Since implementing HEAT and GoldMine, RIA Compliance is enjoying many happy returns. The systems have proven to be unfailingly reliable and fast performing, making it possible for the company to dramatically cut its support system maintenance costs, adapt the systems to ever-changing needs, centralize contact details, and best of all, earn priceless points with customers.
“We want support to be a reason customers not only stay, but buy more from us,” Bennight explained. “We want the kind of tools that are going to help us do that. With HEAT, WebCenter and GoldMine, we’re able to accomplish that for a fair price withall the functionality we could need. We’re proud to say we delivered early and we delivered a system that our customers tell us is better, more robust, more intuitive and more stable.”
For more information on this topic, visit www.frontrange.com.
