Trade and Investment KZN (TIKZN) is a provincial investment promotion agency tasked with driving economic growth in the province through foreign direct investment and export trade.
In a strategy aimed at attracting direct foreign investment, TIKZN has launched a number of new initiatives, not least of which is a completely new Web site and a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.
A private company, ePages.net, was commissioned via a tender process to upgrade the Web site and implement the CRM project.
"TIKZN has a lot of information to share with potential investors in the form of opportunities, latest news and statutory information," comments David Meyrick of ePages.net.
"The content management system allows them to have that information on the site within hours." he said.
TIKZN aims to become an online resource for anyone with a business interest in KZN.
"If someone uses Google to look for information on investing in KZN, we want them to find us," said Ananias Makhado of TIKZN. "We needed an Internet partner who not only understood our technology requirements but could also provide a search engine optimisation strategy to allow us to reach our target markets," he said.
TIKZN needed a way to manage the process of matching a potential investor to business opportunities as well as track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This is where Microsoft CRM comes into its own.
In one of the largest Microsoft CRM implementations in KZN, TIKZN will be able to manage marketing campaigns and track effectiveness as well as manage all customer communications. Microsoft CRM is built to look like and integrate with traditional MS programs such as Outlook and MS Word. This means that training times are shortened and adoption is easier. One of the downfalls of other CRM packages is the duplication of effort when information needs to be captured twice, not the case with MS CRM which logs business communication automatically.
It is anticipated that the CRM package will improve customer response times by providing detailed reports on customer communication, allowing managers to monitor staff performance. Notifications and reminders will allow TIKZN staff to manage the frequency of contact with investors thus enriching the customer relationship.
"We are extremely excited about our partnership with ePages.net and the two projects and are confident that they will improve our workflow processes. We are also engaged in internal teambuilding activities to lift the level of operation of our staff. When we go out to market using any of our tools, we need to be confident that our clients will receive the highest standard of customer service," said Tozi Mthethwa, General Manager for Marketing & Communications at TIKZN.
Share