Electrolux is standardising customer relationship management (CRM) technology across its UK consumer products divisions to boost productivity.

The home appliance manufacturer has already deployed a single user interface in its outdoor products division to remove the need for call centre staff to switch between nine applications. It now wants to extend benefits to include the rest of the company.

Business analysis manager John Yaxley says removing tasks that required staff to enter the same data several times has reduced the number of manual errors and raised productivity.

‘We did have an existing bespoke CRM system, but it was very old,’ he said.
‘It did the job successfully but it was difficult to move it towards integrating with other applications used by the call centre. Updating it also partly future proofs the systems.’

Electrolux’s outdoor products division migrated its old CRM system onto Talent CRM software from vendor Computer Software Group in 2002 (Computing, 26 September 2002).

The division has since cut call-centre costs by a third and reduced the average system training requirement by 50 per cent.

But a growth in the number of customers contacting Electrolux via the internet and by email means the system has to handle more varied forms of input.

‘The synergy of CRM systems and processes enables us to make efficiency savings across divisions,’ said Yaxley. ‘But it also improves the quality of customer service we provide and brings added benefits to the IT team, because it only has one customer care system to support.’

Yaxley says the manufacturer wants to achieve a return on its latest CRM investment before the end of this year, when full integration with the rest of Electrolux customer and product systems data is complete.