Made-to-measure blinds retailer continues to see efficiencies with SAP solutions
SAP UK & Ireland recently announced that UK made-to-measure blind specialist, Hillarys has gone live with SAP CRM 7.0 in order to improve the service it provides to its customers.
Hillarys has 40 years experience in selling manufacturing and distributing made-to-measure blinds, with a nationwide network of 1,000 sales advisors and over 1,000 employees in three sites in the UK. The company has grown organically to a 33% market share, and recognised the need to improve its service platform to match the growth in customer base and the ever-increasing demands of consumers. As part of a companywide service improvement initiative, Hillarys embarked on a redesign of its systems and processes to streamline customer service with consequent efficiency improvements.
Julian Bond, head of information communications technology for Hillarys Blinds, commented: “Service has always been a central component of our offering to customers. However, increasing competition and rising consumer expectations highlighted the need for a quantum leap in our service platform in order to maintain market leadership. To better support our field-based sales and installation network, and end consumers, we needed to provide our service centre agents with the tools and information to improve first-call resolution, internal communication and delivering on our commitments.”
Part of business transformation
An existing SAP customer, Hillarys selected SAP CRM 7.0 and embarked on its business improvement programme named ‘Service Breakthrough’ with SAP partner, AgilityWorks. Through standard integration the customer relationship management (CRM) front office and SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) back-office share dynamic information, with real-time dashboards delivered by SAP BusinessObjects Edge and analytics using SAP Business Warehouse. Work has already started on the next phase of the roadmap, which will widen organisational deployment and leverage Hillarys existing SAP Process Integration infrastructure to exploit real world service-oriented architecture (SOA) opportunities.
“Our CRM deployment helps us to better keep our promises to customers. It makes these promises more visible to our staff, and their colleagues and managers. This greater visibility allows us to escalate, prioritise and resolve, and brings a new degree of empowerment and accountability” said Bond.
“The service breakthrough programme than CRM underpins is already resulting in improved first-call resolution, less complaints and reduced credits. Although it is still early days, good progress is being made towards the target of reducing the volume of transferred calls by 30%,” concluded Bond.
Julian Bond is presenting “CRM 7 at Hillarys Blinds: Pivotal to Service Breakthrough” at the UK & Ireland SAP User Group Conference 2010 in Manchester on 23 November.
