Posts Tagged ‘Retail’

Retail Stock Brokerage and Wealth Management Firms Enhance Customer Equity with Sage CRM

The recent stock market boom in India has resulted in a lot of erstwhile small to mid sized stock brokers expanding to become larger in size and scale with a network of sub brokers and an extensive direct sales team to cater to the increasing number of individual investors in the market. Retail brokerages have also diversified to extend Wealth Management services covering stock trading, investments in mutual funds, insurance products, and a host of other retail financial products. The focus has also been on advisory services to strengthen the  ‘stickiness’ in their relationship. We now have a new breed of ‘relationship managers’ that dot the financial services sbusiness. This sudden business expansion has made it imperative for these companies to adopt new technologies and proven best practices in CRM to ensure customer satisfaction, profitability and productivity.

Challenges

Typically, brokerages advertise in various media to generate enquiries. Leads get generated through e-mail, phone-ins, web registrations or walk-ins and are generally captured at their in-house Call Center. These are then routed by the Customer Service team to the concerned sales person, sub broker or agent based on location and expertise. These leads are further qualified, profiled and their credit worthiness checked before initiating a relationship with them. If the leads

are managed and allocated manually, it is quite possible that a number of them may slip through the cracks and get lost. Furthermore, brokerage companies spend huge amounts of money on advertising and other campaigns. Since there is no established process to track the effectiveness of these campaigns and calculate the return on investment from business generated through these leads, the company is unable to determine which marketing program is actually driving increased business and often unable to optimize their Marketing investments.

After an account is set up the customer starts building up his investment portfolio through trading and other investments. In the course of these transactions, he is likely to have a number of queries or issues related to system access, funds credit, account status, asset appreciation and other updates. These queries and complaints need to be captured and addressed in a timely fashion or escalated for intervention and action while maintaining acceptable turnaround times.

Time is of essence in this business therefore any delays in responding to customer issues can result in customer dissatisfaction and potential attrition. The company also needs to maintain internal timeline service commitments for responding to queries to ensure that their customers remain satisfied. Automated systems are required to ensure the right persons are involved to address specific issues with proper controls and an escalation process in place. Detailed trading and investment information of customers is generally available in disparate systems depending on the investment type, namely, stock trades, insurance, mutual funds. Since this cannot be easily accessed by the customer service team, they are sometimes unable to respond to simple

customer queries in real-time. If data on customer transactions were to be made available to the customer service team, they would have a 360 degree view of the customer which would

greatly reduce the time taken to address customer issues and improve customer delight.

Solution

Sage CRM is an easy to use, fast to deploy, feature rich Customer Relationship Management software with out-of-box and configurable business processes. With modules for sales, marketing and customer service. Sage CRM comes with features such as lead management, sales automation, customer service, campaign management, interactive Dashboards and reports.

Using Sage CRM, leads can be managed across multiple channels like Phone, E-mail, SMS, Web enquiries, and Walkins. Leads are tracked from first contact to final closure with a

well defined work flow that has built in assignment and escalation rules. An example of this would be where a sales person ‘on the move’ gets a lead assigned to him on his mobile via SMS based on his territorial responsibility. He is therefore able to take action instantly and efficiently utilize his time on the road. It also enables the sales team to effectively analyze and manage the sales pipeline and review the history of each prospect, hence reducing administrative tasks to a minimum. Sales representatives and managers can have instant access to sales reports, graphs and forecasts for immediate analysis and decision-making.

Sage CRM customer service enables the Call center of the brokerage house to streamline call ins, E-mails and other contact points into a central repository and enable a smooth interaction with end customers. With Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Sage CRM enables a seamless handover process from call-ins. The Customer service rep can retrieve the appropriate customer record to quickly address customer issues. Similar process is established with e-mails sent in by

customers. Information availability is complete with the necessary integration of Sage CRM with back-end transaction systems which makes the job of the Customer service rep even

more seamless. The solution also tracks every customer interaction which ensures that the most up-to-date information is available. It helps users adhere to work-flow processes whereby customer issues that remain inactive for a predefined period of time, are automatically escalated. By enabling bidirectional exchange of customer data and consolidation of customer transaction and communication information on a single screen, Sage CRM provides customer service

professionals with a 360-degree view of the customer. They can access relevant information including transactions, calls and escalation history and all communication sent and

received. The built-in reporting function comes in a userfriendly and presentable format so that details of customer issues and requests can be analyzed easily.

Benefits

Sage CRM offers the following key business benefits to stock brokerage and wealth management firms :

1. Streamlines the Lead Management process thereby ensuring that leads are not lost.

2. Build up Risk profiles of customers to leverage future product selling opportunities.

3. Integrate the Call center with the Sales and Operations teams to offer a seamless

experience to customers.

4. Enable relationship managers to have a 360º view of their customers thereby ensuring a more proactive approach to managing them.

5. Integrate disparate systems within the organization thereby eliminating ‘silos’ of information and improving operational efficiencies.

6. Improve customer servicing capabilities with better response times and more empowered customer service reps which in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction levels.

To know more about Sage CRM Solutions you can visit http://www.sagesoftware.co.in

Three Major Differences Between a Retail Call Center and a Medical Center

If you are a doctor then you have a responsibility to your patients.  Why pay for just an answering service when you could employ the services of a medical call center?  What is the difference anyway?  Let’s consider four reasons why a medical center service is ideal for your setting.

1. Representatives are HIPAA trained and experienced in a medical field.

Though most call center employees are experienced in telephone secretarial work, most do have medical training.  However, medical training and knowledge is becoming more important in this age of rampant malpractice lawsuits.  HIPAA in particular is gaining a lot of attention, as this pertains to medical records and the necessity of privacy.  When you hire a medical answering service you can be assured that your workers know how the doctor’s office works and what information can be legally exchanged.

2. A Medical Call Center Has its Priorities Straight

A regular call center handles all sorts of clients, from practices to retail stores and even tech support.  It would be unfortunate to have to keep a patient waiting for test results or medical advice while fifty callers inquiring about computer software are ahead in line.  With a medical answering service, doctors can be assured that only medical clients are handled by the company.  Therefore, your patients are not competing against frivolous or less important cases. 

3. A medical answering service limits the number of clients per operator.

Some outsourcing jobs burden down clients with over 150 clients per working schedule.  That can be rather confusing for the operator, but even worse, because of work fatigue it can lead to numerous errors and long holding times that affect patients.  Most top medical outsource companies limit their operator’s clients to a modest number so that more time can be spent on each call. 

As you can see, medical call centers offer a far more professional and intricate level of service.  Besides this advanced level of quality, you also get some useful features like call screening.  This lets you receive important messages while filtering out less important ones.  You can be notified of priority messages through email, voice mail, text message, fax or pager. 

When you offer your services as a physician to sick patients you are obligating yourself greatly.  You are taking responsibility for their welfare.  Investing in a medical call center can help you look after your patients long after your work day is done.

Lean Six Sigma in Retail and Distribution: Value Stream Improvements

Project Outline

Used Value Stream Mapping, a Lean Six Sigma tool, as the foundation for evaluating costs from “Field to Table” All direct and indirect processing costs were analyzed A cross functional team of employees was formed to conduct this analysis including Accounting, Retail Operations, Distribution, Transportation, Marketing, Procurement and Merchandising All departments that had a role in purchasing, advertising, distributing, retailing and accounting were mapped Labor functions in each department were time studied Outside purchased service costs were researched All job functions in this process were unitized to a cost per case Cost categories were sorted from highest to lowest Observations and financial analysis derived from the time studies led to numerous cost reduction opportunities in the Value Stream Results were presented to senior management, who in turn initiated a Lean Six Sigma program to form teams and implement the cost reductions in these areas Projects were prioritized from highest to lowest cost savings

Project Details

The cross functional team began by creating a Value Stream Map. Using the map, they created a time study matrix.  These team members were “subject matter experts” and knew where to go, whom to speak with and how to get the time study and financial data we needed to allocate all of the overhead expenses to a per case cost.

As an example, we time studied the time it takes to unload an inbound vendor truck at the distribution center.  Based on the time it required, the hourly rate of the unloader and the number of cases unloaded, we could determine the “unitized” cost per case from unloading a truck.

Cost per Case = (Labor Time x Hourly labor rate) / # of Cases Processed

Even Accounting functions were unitized to a per case cost.  The time required to process a vendor invoice was multiplied by an accounting clerk’s hourly rate and divided by the average case quantity on an order.

For services such as shipping, freight costs to the stores and financial data were gathered and allocated by the number of cases on the truck.

In addition to the detailed analysis, the team made observations while time studying different functions or when gathering financial data.  Some of the highest priority cost reduction opportunities came from these observations.

Results

Many companies search for cost reduction opportunities by soliciting employee feedback in an ad-hoc manner.  Instead, this company used time study and financial analysis of their value stream, to calculate how much overhead functions were costing the company at the unit level.  The highest cost areas, plus observations made during the time study analysis, identified many cost reducing opportunities.

These projects were prioritized by ease of implementation (easier were higher priority) and benefit (higher savings were higher priority).  Management then began using Lean Six Sigma as a vehicle to address each opportunity and reap the savings. The easy to implement high savings projects were launched first.

Cost Reduction Opportunities Discovered

Below is a sample of the cost reduction opportunities discovered:

Checkout Productivity – productivity of the checkout clerks is below target SKU Proliferation – Items for sale (SKU – or Stock Keeping Unit) had grown far above the target Store are not optimizing ordering quantities to eliminate stock-outs and improve stocking productivity What is the optimum store-open hours related to expense to keep the store open versus sales Newspaper advertising effectiveness Optimizing transportation costs between distribution centers, to stores and backhauling product from vendors Newspaper Ads are reviewed multiple times by many executives, causing costs to increase and slowing down responsiveness Vendor invoice discrepancies – resolution costs Distribution Centers do not select items and place on pallets to enable quick stocking at the stores Distribution Centers have numerous opportunities to improve order-selector productivity

These are the top ten cost reduction opportunities.  In total we identified 30 possible Lean Six Sigma projects.  In addition, the initial projects identified other cost reduction opportunities.

Checkpoint Systems Retail Monitoring Center Receives CSAA Five Diamond Certification

Checkpoint Systems Retail Monitoring Center Receives CSAA Five Diamond Certification
Checkpoint Systems, Inc., a leading global supplier of shrink management, merchandise visibility and apparel labeling solutions for the retail industry and its supply chain, has received the Central Station Alarm Association’s (CSAA) prestigious Five Diamond Certification designation for its Retail Monitoring Center.

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