Chuck Udzinski, Consumer Services Manager, Black & Decker, was recently interviewed for the CMC 2005 CRM Supplement which looks at the views of technology providers and technology users. Click here to view the CRM supplement.
1. Can you give us a brief description of your company and its main areas of business?
Black & Decker® is a global manufacturer of power tools and accessories, hardware and home improvement products, and technology-based fastening systems. The company markets its products and services in more than 100 countries, with manufacturing operations in 11 countries. Black & Decker has earned its reputation for innovation in product design, customer-focus, quality and value. Enjoying worldwide recognition for its brand, Black & Decker also has the most extensive global distribution in its industry.
2. When did your company first start thinking about CRM?
We first began back in 1997/8 and when we were just overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to talk to us via email and we were looking to hire a number of agents to help us with the demand when we got involved with RightNow. We were able to avoid hiring those agents and capitalise on creating a relationship with the customers who were wanting to contact us.
3. What key business issues were you hoping to address through CRM? Which was most important to the business and why?
The ability to achieve a 360 degree view of the customer has been a goal of ours for quite some time now.
We are in the process of building upon our initial implementation of RightNow and are considering expanding that relationship to include the marketing module and perhaps the sales module. We also want to expand the role that our existing RightNow Service module currently plays in our organisations. We currently use the Service module in the call centre to track calls and emails. But our vision is to apply this to our service network, certainly throughout the United States, creating a network of service centres that are owned and operated by Black and Decker.
Currently a customer calls our call centre and we have that part of the puzzle sewn up. But we want to be able to then refer that person on to a service centre - we need to fill in the gap between the two which currently exisits.
4. What results or improvements did you initially hope to achieve through a CRM programme?
Initial success back in the early days was being able to avoid hiring extra agents. We were literally working out of the call centre with our standard email client of the day to respond, painfully, 1 by 1 back to the customers. With RightNow we were able to avoid an initial investment of around $175,000 in those extra agents by deploying a service oriented CRM system.
We deployed RightNow Service throughout the call centre and all of our agents are using it, not only to manage emails but to track phone calls as well. The big gain there has been our ability to capture the business intelligence that come into the organisation every day.
Our old model was probably fairly typical of a lot of call centres in that we would collect the information, we had the knowledge, but if you were a decision makers - say, someone in product management - you had to know that there was a call centre, where it was and who to call to get the information you needed. But sometimes the information would be 4, 5, 6, 7 months old, sometimes older. That was a real weakness in our old system.
Today, with RightNow Service we have been able to set up a system so that when an agent answers a call we can capture the relevant data that the agent saves. This then activates a business rule in the system that sends a real-time notification via email out to any number of individuals about what that customer said/wanted etc. So, we have several hundred Black and Decker employees who are signed up globally to receive these notifications. Those employees are managers, engineering staff, product development etc and they get this burst of information from specific phone calls. On a number of occasions the information has been priceless. For example, making a slight modification to an existing product which may have already been planned, but by getting the information so quickly there's a better chance that we can avoid some sort of cost and some potential customer dissatisfaction.
5. How did you go about deciding which CRM system to implement? How long did it take you to decide and how many vendors did you contact?
That's going back a way….. we considered a few others, EGain for example. I'm having a tough time remembering others! I would say that we looked at 2 or 3 other solutions.
RightNow stood apart with it's Knowledge Base and the work that they had put into creating a dynamic knowledge base. And also price - the price of RightNow was right for us.
6. How much consultation and support did you receive from your chosen vendor before during and after implementation?
The support has always been very good. RightNow has always been dedicated to making our call centre a success. Before implementation the amount of time and effort they put into scoping out the project was excellent and they also employed a full time project manager during the implementation process. They worked very closely with us - weekly phone calls, on-site visits. After implementation they provided very good support. They also responded very quickly whenever we had questions. I give them good marks for the support we received throughout the project.
7. What problems did you encounter during the process? How did you overcome them? What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome (i.e. board level support, budget restrictions, IT infrastructure problems, cultural change etc.)
The cultural change was the biggest challenge. Let me put it in this context - when we think back to our first implementation, we were just using it for email management so there wasn't a huge learning curve with the agents. They could get up to speed relatively quickly.
However, when we deployed 'Service' to the entire call centre we were replacing a legacy system that had been in place for 12 years at the time. There was a huge issue of changing from that system to RightNow Service because the workforce here were set in there ways and not the most technically savvy group of people. So, they had a lot of challenges learning to use the new processes. We took a bit of a hit in the first 90 days as agents went through the learning curve but then things improved and we started to see the benefits. They perhaps didn't embrace the new technology immediately or as quickly as we'd have liked but they have come on board since and things are now running smoothly again.
We realised that a lot more data entry would be required so we developed a program with a local community college. The college came on site after hours and ran a keyboarding class for 5 weeks. That helped with our agents typing skills. They also did some of the RightNow computer based training modules as well as having a RightNow trainer come into the call centre and doing a one day training course.
The RightNow test site was also made available to the agents so they could have a play with it and become comfortable with the system prior to launch.
8. Did the implementation project finish on time and on budget?
It did finish on budget. We run a little long in the tooth time-wise for a number of reasons. RightNow v.6. wasn't quite ready so we pushed the date back a little. We also needed a little more time to co-ordinate all the changes at our end but it was mutually acceptable and we were okay with the timescale in the long-run.
9. Now that it's up and running, does your chosen system meet your requirements? Would you recommend your current system to another company?
It does meet our requirements. We are constantly looking for ways to integrate RightNow into our operation and one of the ways we did that was with SAP in our order to cash management system. It was essential that we integrated this system with RightNow and RightNow did an excellent job with integrating SAP.
In terms of recommending RightNow to other companies, the answer would be Yes. I've had a number of companies and potential RightNow customers contact me and I've always recommended RightNow and will continue to do so.
10. As we all know, implementation is just the first stage in a CRM programme. What are your plans for the future - further enhancements, staff training, cultural changes, delivering ROI in x years etc?
We are looking at a broader implementation of RightNow - more along the lines of the marketing module and then possibly the Sales module.
The first thing that we want to accomplish is deploying 'Service' to other parts of the business rather than just the call centre. We provide a lot of data to other business units in the organisation such as product development, engineering etc and today we have the silo of data within the call centre, but data from other sources i.e. service centres is kept elsewhere etc. What we're getting from managers is ' What can we do to get all the data in one repository?' That's really where we're heading next.
We do also have a cash transaction unit for customers who call in and want to buy a spare part or accessory and currently they're using a legacy system which is 20 years old. So, in the first quarter of 2006 we're looking to integrate this process with RightNow and get those people using the same system.
11. Do you have any other specific advice you'd like to offer to our members about the highs and lows of CRM, the benefits it can deliver and the process you need to go through to get there?
One of the pitfalls that we experienced (although we recognised it early on and tried to lesson the impact) would dealing with the cultural change. Whatever measures you put in place to make it easier, I would say - double them! The issues we had had nothing to do with the application itself. It was all about the human element and the ability to adopt the new knowledge. I would encourage everyone to be aware of this pitfall.
On the benefits side, 'think outside the box' when you're looking at applications and look at new ways to get a return on your investment which might not always be in dollars and cents. In our call centre, we're not collected cash or revenue but what we are do is capturing business intelligence and pushing it out to decision makers in the organisations. It's a little harder to quantify your ROI in those terms - but it's not always just about increasing revenues.
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