Stamp of Approval for Business Intelligence
Continued
Having numerous business units presented too many faces to the customer. For example, Pitney Bowes ran separate call centers for service, billing, inquiry, and sales, with two more centers overseas. There was limited connectivity to the company's legacy systems, which made it difficult to execute a sales plan based on retention loyalty and cross-selling—all tactics that are more successful if the sales reps can draw from a wealth of customer data. Moreover, the company found it difficult to manage segmented sales campaigns effectively, as they had to depend on manual lists to develop and target the campaign.
Duffy committed to using Siebel Marketing in 2002 to automate campaign development but planned to use a competitive product for reporting. However, when Siebel acquired nQuire in July of 2002, Pitney Bowes took a risk on the new technology and launched Siebel Marketing reporting in May 2003.
The move paid off—the group could access data to successfully create telemarketing campaigns on retention and loyalty, and increased sales drove a doubling of the staff by 2005. Next the group implemented Siebel Analytics applications for field service workers, phasing them in over the course of four deployments from October 2003 to May 2006. "Five hundred service center reps went online in November of 2003, with reporting dashboards rolled out to 50 service managers," says Duffy. The group was able to replace 200 legacy reports with Siebel Analytics, and the metrics became critical for service-level key performance indicators. Issues such as how fast service tickets are closed, average response time, and average days a service request is open can all be tracked on the manager dashboard. Analytics are now the sole source for field service metrics, giving Pitney Bowes one informational source. The 1,500 service workers have now gone wireless, extending the reach of analytics still further.
Empowering the Sales Force
Duffy next turned his attention to the sales force, implementing the first phase of Oracle's Siebel Sales Force Automation software in January 2005. "That was huge," says Duffy. "It automates the sales prospecting process. The sales folks have laptops. We tell them what customers to hit, who is coming to an end of a lease, things like that. Through analytics we can record that information, and all of a sudden we can see what we are working on."
The company also deployed management dashboards for executives that allow them to view sales numbers at the district, regional, and individual level. "It empowers management to better direct their people, because it gives insight on opportunities with existing customers," says Duffy. As of late 2006, Duffy had extended the Siebel Sales Force Automation module to more than 1,500 sales force workers, with dashboards being used by 300 sales executives. "Suddenly, executives can clearly measure productivity, and they can't get enough of it," says Duffy.
