Hillarys Blinds improves windows of opportunity with SAP CRM

Julian Bond, head of ICT at Hillarys Blinds, explains that, having reached a 33% market share, the firm recognised the need to fundamentally improve its service platform to match the ever increasing demands of consumers. Hence the redesign of its systems and processes to streamline customer service, which is part of a company-wide service improvement initiative, dubbed Service Breakthrough. "Increasing competition and rising consumer expectations highlighted the need for a quantum leap in our service platform to maintain market leadership," comments Bond. "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," he explains. As an existing SAP user, going for SAP CRM 7.0 was an obvious choice, not least because of its standard integration into its ERP back-office. Bond points to the fact that it would enable the firm to share dynamic information, with real-time dashboards delivered by SAP BusinessObjects Edge and analytics using SAP Business Warehouse. He adds that work has already started on the next phase, which will widen organisational deployment and use Hillarys existing SAP process integration infrastructure to exploit SOA (service-oriented architecture) opportunities. "Our CRM deployment helps us to keep our promises to customers. It makes these promises more visible to our staff, and their colleagues and managers. This greater visibility also allows us to escalate, prioritise and resolve – and brings a new degree of empowerment and accountability," says Bond. And he adds:"Although it is still early days, good progress is being made towards the target of reducing the volume of transferred calls by 30%."