“As a company, we wanted to move on from ‘What can we offer?’ to
‘What do our customers really need?’”
—Tulika Shahoo, ERP Systems Manager, Axium International
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.
PeopleSoft CRM also has a significant impact on one of the
IT department’s biggest customers, the sales staff. “It really
improved communication between sales staff, client services,
and payroll operations,” says Gelfand. “We’ve heard very good
comments from them about how it improved their handling of
sales strategies and how it unified them into a single consolidated process, even among a very diverse group of salespeople.
When you try to map out the stages of our sales process and
create a single universal workflow, it’s almost impossible,
because every single salesperson from the entertainment industry works in a very different way. In Hollywood, it’s all about
the handshake, about relationships and who you know. With
PeopleSoft CRM, everything about the customer, as well as
potential clients, is right there in front of whoever needs to see
it. It brings the sales staff together, as one team.”
“As a company, we wanted to move on from ‘What can we
offer?’ to ‘What do our customers really need?’” adds Tulika
Sahoo, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems manager for
Axium International. “Customer information was scattered and
dependent on individuals who interacted directly with customers on many levels, and there was no central location where
all the information was gathered, processed, and available for
review. With the implementation of PeopleSoft CRM, we get a
360-degree view of customers. The product scalability and Web
access of PeopleSoft—important because our user base is all
over the world—make it a very reliable tool for our company.”
