Putting Customers at the Center

Continued

Putting the Customers In Control

Whereas Madacy has built its business on making it easy for retailers to serve the end user, Revolution Health Group is building its future on the quality of direct contact with the end user. This leading Web-based health company was launched in 2005 by America Online cofounder Steve Case, who wants his new venture to be "the most trusted brand in health." It's part of the Revolution family of companies founded by Case "to give consumers more choice, control, and convenience in important aspects of their lives."

With that kind of setup, Revolution Health really had no choice but to make customer centricity a mission-critical priority. "In the healthcare marketplace, there is definitely room for improvement in putting consumers at the center," says Dan Israel, product manager for the company's CRM operations. "Our mission is to put consumers more in control, to give them more power and more confidence in making health decisions. Customer centricity has been a focus of ours from Day One, because we believe this is a real opportunity to differentiate ourselves."

Revolution Health has three cornerstone operations. RevolutionHealth.com offers comprehensive health and medical information at no cost, along with more than 125 free online tools to help people take control of their well-being and an online community that brings people with similar health experiences together to share and learn. The company also provides employers with benefits navigation services and extended telephone services (such as finding a healthcare professional in a given locale, scheduling appointments, and advocating for consumers on insurance claims) for employees. A third facet of the business involves helping consumers make informed choices on healthcare insurance coverage.

A beta version of RevolutionHealth.com launched in January 2007, and a fully functioning version launched in April. In February 2007, the company rolled out Oracle CRM On Demand (formerly Siebel CRM On Demand) not only to put its external customers—people looking for healthcare information and assistance—at the center of its universe before the April Web site launch but to keep internal customers—a customer service team, a marketing team, and two sales teams—in a tight orbit around them.

"One of the reasons we chose [Oracle] CRM On Demand is that it's a hosted solution and we were able to deploy it on a very aggressive time frame," says Israel. "From the time we signed the contract with Oracle until we went live was just about 60 days, which we thought was impressive.

"As a young company, it's important that we present ourselves as professionally as possible. Our member services group needs to be able to track the nature of incoming service requests—who's working on them, how they're being resolved, and how quickly we're able to turn around a response to the customer. It's also very important for our customer service team, fielding calls and e-mails from the Web site, to have an understanding of our customers' full history of interactions with us, so we needed that integration between our CRM system and our Web portal," explains Israel.

Within 15 minutes of the moment a person visits the Web site and creates a username and password, the customer service team has a record of the activity, allowing it to provide better service and ultimately allowing the sales teams to more accurately target new products and services. "Our sales teams are very avid users of [Oracle] CRM On Demand at this point," says Israel. "The analytic complexity built into [Oracle] CRM On Demand was a big selling point for us. Being able to build our own reports, to design them on the fly so they meet the needs of the specific people who are using them, and with the flexibility to change them over time as we uncover new needs, that's a really valuable tool."

Giving Customers What They Need

Uncovering new needs is a daily occurrence at Axium Entertainment, a Los Angeles, California-based provider of payroll services and financial technology for the entertainment industry. Axium thrives in a world of unpredictable and ever-changing customers and workflows, specializing in complex, often-limited-term payroll projects. When a film studio makes a movie, chances are very good that Axium is the official employer of record for the crew, directors, and actors. When paychecks are distributed, Axium is probably the company that wrote them.

For Axium Entertainment's sales team, that brings a certain glamour, but behind the scenes, it means a list of challenges as long as the credits on a feature-length film. In 2006, Axium implemented Oracle's PeopleSoft customer relationship management (CRM) to bring consistency and transparency to the process. "PeopleSoft CRM has enhanced our operations in ways that a lot of people, especially in the entertainment industry, couldn't really imagine," says Roman Gelfand, vice president of enterprise systems for Axium Entertainment's parent company, Axium International. "They couldn't believe we have a system that could really unify and provide this type of visibility across the entire payroll lifecycle—from the initial point of sale all the way down to the final check delivery."

Prior to the implementation, Axium operated on outdated legacy systems with multiple levels of paperwork and no mapping features for process, checkpoints, or quality control. Now every step is mapped out and every interaction recorded, from the beginning of the sales process to the moment actual payroll is distributed. That has benefits for the end client in not only keeping employees happy with a smooth payroll process but also in facilitating back-office regulatory compliance and reporting.