Ergonomic solution
Context and business issuesAtlantic Business Interiors is an office furniture company based in Halifax, with branches in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, and a staff of more than 40. The company’s market positioning on a local level is very strong – “We rank first or second locally,” said marketing supervisor Ryan Beaton – but in spite of this success, marketing and sales efforts have been “disjointed.” In Beaton’s words, the company “never totally understood customer interactions.” To improve the customer engagement process, Atlantic Business Interiors deployed
Solve 360, a CRM tool that allows staffers to share contact information and how they interact with customers throughout the organization.
The IT solutionSolve 360 is offered by Calgary-based Norada Corporation. The CRM software offers a reporting function to show which upcoming projects are in progress as well as their dollar value. In addition, there is a scheduling function which allows sales representatives and members of the marketing team to log activity in a contact’s profile. Solve 360 also has a shared email database which displays the contact information of customers and prospects.
Outcomes, lessons learned and best practicesBefore launching Solve 360 CRM, Atlantic Business Interiors provided training to familiarize employees with use of the system. The company also imported information from its Outlook database into Solve 360. “We ensured we knew which parameters it would import and matched them up against what we had, such as customer name and address. We created custom fields and populated a spreadsheet with our information when we imported it,” Beaton explained. The CRM is launched through a browser; Beaton noted that Atlantic Business Interiors was able to implement the software using its own staff resources.
