Using FrontRange Solutions` customer relationship management solution GoldMine, courier company, Dawn Wing, has reduced its customer loss rate from 9.7% to 1%.
Based in Johannesburg with branches in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban, Nelspruit and Pretoria, the company serves both the local and international markets, employs 300 people and manages a countrywide fleet of 400 vehicles.
Dawn Wing national IT director, Ashen Govender, says the company`s customer service has been of a high enough standard to earn it the PMR Diamond Arrow Award for best courier for the past three years. "But, because we started small and grew very rapidly, the gap between our sales representatives and our customer base was beginning to widen.
"Also, no customer information was being captured in a format comprehensive enough to share across the organisation or influence strategic decisions. So we ran the risk of losing additional business opportunities that could be sourced from an intelligently structured database.
"Our sales people each have about 200 customers to service. Inevitably, most of their attention was going to their biggest customers and the very considerable extra business they could have been generating from the greater number of smaller customers was falling by the wayside.
"With GoldMine, we can schedule repeat visits by our sales reps to the whole customer base, ensuring they capitalise on opportunities. We`ve also told them that if it`s not in GoldMine it doesn`t exist. In other words, they have to capture detailed data about their interactions with customers as part of their key performance indicators. And with that data we can package more relevant services for individual customers.
"In effect, GoldMine enables us to put the full marketing and organisational power of the entire organisation behind our sales staff. And the benefits of doing that have kicked in very quickly."
Dawn Wing investigated five customer relationship management products before settling on GoldMine. "We wanted something that would fit into our operational environment without too much customisation and that would be easy to manage, as we have no internal IT department," Govender says.
When the order for GoldMine was placed in December 2004, Dawn Wing took the unusual step of employing a dedicated project manager, Taurai Nyaruwata - not just for the initial implementation but for deeper exploitation of GoldMine`s functionality over time.
FrontRange Solutions (SA) managing director, Tracey Newman, agrees. "Our experience with customers all over the world shows that success in business is determined by the way information is gathered and acted upon within the organisation.
"Which is why all our products are designed to enable the sharing of information in such a way that it allows management to be both pro-active and creative. And, as Dawn Wing has discovered, intelligent automation of the ways in which information is shared is one of the easiest and quickest ways to achieve significant, tangible productivity gains."
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