Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Technology Investment Helps Communications Firm Provide Superior Customer Service
Overview
Country or Region:Singapore
Industry:Mobile satellite services
Customer Profile
SingTel Mobile Satellite Business (MSB), a unit of SingTel Group, is Asia's leading communications company with operations and investments in many countries and territories, worldwide.
Business Situation
SingTel MSB wanted to provide a faster, reliable, and more efficient service for its growing customer base by providing a system that would help provide consistent and responsive customer support.
Solution
SingTel MSB, through the help of solutions provider Yokogawa Engineering Asia, implemented a customer relationship management solution using Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM.
Benefits
Improves response time consistency
Strengthens customer relationships
Meets employee needs
Prepares company for future growth / “Microsoft CRM is truly a value-for-money solution for midmarket companies that have big potential for growth.”
Simon Tan, Director of Sales, SingTel Mobile Satellite Business
SingTel’s Mobile Satellite Business (MSB), part of the SingTel Group, has been providing mobile satellite services to 44 million customers throughout Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. As a company that serves its customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, SingTelMSB needed a solution that would fulfil its aggressive goal of responding to customer service calls within two days. Teamed with Yokogawa Engineering Asia, SingTel MSB deployed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution built on Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM. As a result of its CRM solution, SingTel MSB has strengthened its customer relationships by consistently meeting service-level goals. What’s more, highly customizable to meet unique business needs, Microsoft CRM helps prepare the company for future growth.
Situation
The SingTel Group is one of Asia’s leading mobile operators, serving 44 million customers in a broad cross-section of industries throughout Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Through its Mobile Satellite Business (MSB) the SingTel Group has been providing mobile satellite services since 1982, and enhancing its competitiveness by catering to customers who, because of their unique locations and requirements, are best served by powerful satellite connectivity.
“We serve anyone who needs reliable, high-speed connectivity anywhere, anytime,” says Simon Tan, Director of Sales of SingTel MSB.
Three divisions within SingTel Group, including marketing, sales and customer services, and satellite station operations, support the Mobile Satellite Business. Simon Tan, Director of Sales at SingTel MSB says customer service plays a pivotal role in MSB's operation. “Our business requires us to respond quickly and adequately to customer inquiries and problems. This requirement is why our customer service staff members are extremely important; they are the lifeline to our customers,” he says.
SingTel MSBemploys professional customer service staff members who attend to customer service requirements around-the-clock. The company tries to maintain a service-level response time of two hours, but can encounter difficulty completing tasks within the allocated timeframe because of inconsistent data organization. In addition, inconsistent alerts to other support staff meant that information was not being shared efficiently across functional teams, and often further delayed customer response times.
The company recognized its level of customer service as essential to greater success and wanted a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. SingTel MSB knew a CRM solution would help enable two things to happen: quicker response time with more consistent alerts to customer queries and requests, and easier access with consistent sharing of information across functional teams. Furthermore, the solution needed to be simple and easy to learn, yet highly efficient and cost-effective. “Our customer service members are always busy. We wanted a solution that they could learn quickly and use with minimal training and supervision,” adds Tan.
Solution
SingTel MSB decided to engage a partner to develop a CRM solution. "Our key consideration in the selection of a partner was the ability to understand our unique business and propose a CRM solution that could be customized to meet our unique requirements," says Tan Tian Seng, Director of Marketing at SingTel MSB.
SingTel MSB found an able partner in Yokogawa Engineering Asia, the regional headquarters of Yokogawa Electric Corporation. Yokogawa Electric Corporation specializes in process automation, test and measurement, and is an IT services provider with 89 years of market segment experience and an impressive track record.
After evaluating the business requirements of SingTel MSB, Yokogawa Engineering Asia helped implement Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM and provided SingTel with an integrated CRM solution that is easily customizable to meet exacting business needs.
“We worked together to create a flow chart of the CRM process through business strategies and evaluation. Then, we mapped SingTel MSB’s business processes and customized Microsoft CRM to meet SingTel MSB’s specific needs. By mapping business processes, we can customize Microsoft CRM so that users can identify business steps easily,” says Han Ngi Juan, General Manager at Yokogawa Engineering Asia.
SingTel MSB’s customer services team was happy with the results. Through the help of
Yokogawa Engineering Asia, SingTel was able to implement a customized CRM solution that fits its current business requirements, while providing room to scale and meet future business demands. “Throughout the implementation, mutual understanding has been the key. We are pleased with the outcome of the project,” says Seng.
Benefits
As a result of its implementation of Microsoft CRM, SingTel MSB has improved the consistency in customer response times and strengthened customer relationships. What’s more, with the easy customization and scalability of Microsoft CRM, the company feels even better prepared for future growth.
Improves Response Time Consistency
With a shared knowledge base accessed by the three SingTel divisions, customer service staff members can serve customers more efficiently by using automated routing and queuing features.
“The Microsoft CRM solution features tightly integrated sales and customer service functionality to help enable easy viewing, updating, and sharing of information across teams involved in our operation,” says Seng.
SingTel MSB can receive timely alerts and achieve consistency in its now-standard, two-hour response time to customers. “It is important to us that we are able to respond to our customers' needs in the fastest way possible by using a unified interface that can be accessed by both the front-end and back-end staff. Our commitment to customers does not stop at delivering only quality service based on service-level agreements; we want our customers to see us as a flexible, reliable partner, able to respond to their changing business demands,” Seng explains.
Strengthens Customer Relationships
Microsoft CRM allows customer service staff members to create, assign, and manage cases based on customer service requests, and helps enable staff members to manage actions and communications centrally for each case. Now customer service staff members are able to identify customers easily, view all information (including sales and order details), and better understand customers’ specific requirements. The solution also helps customer service staff members to generate auto-response e-mail messages to customers' requests, and to establish a more personalized and involved customer relationships.
"Microsoft CRM allows us to create and maintain service contracts such that, when a case has been resolved, relevant contact information automatically updates," notes Tan.
Meets Employees Needs
SingTel MSB specified that it wanted a “business-oriented solution” as its top priority. The company wanted a solution that could take all the many aspects of its business processes into consideration. Even more importantly, SingTel MSB hoped its employees would take ownership and use the solution enthusiastically. With a familiar and easy-to-use interface, customer service staff members at SingTel MSB have had no problem using the solution. “Microsoft Business Solutions CRM has been designed for ease of use by providing access to the customer's server platform through Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, a personal information and communication program with which nearly everyone is familiar,” explains Han. “By using a familiar interface, the learning curve for Microsoft CRM was very short. Employees were able to use the new solution without hesitation and have subsequently endorsed it.”
Prepares Company for Future Growth
The Microsoft CRM solution used by SingTel MSB currently applies to five, related functions: account management, contact management, sales management, knowledge management, and e-business. The solution was designed to integrate with Microsoft Business Solutions for Financial Management, which helps enable customers to capitalize on mapping key data, including accounts, contacts, product catalogues, orders, and price lists. In addition, Microsoft CRM functions can also be exposed through application program interfaces (APIs) for integration with third-party applications and Web services. “Microsoft CRM is truly a value-for-money solution for midmarket companies that have big potential for growth,” says Tan.
He adds, “We learned that the CRM solution we implemented can be further enhanced to provide timely management of information concerning customers, competitors, and markets segments. In the future, to enhance our future operations, we can capitalize on functions such as time management tools, telemarketing services, marketing, lead and opportunity management, and business intelligence. Microsoft Business Solutions, indeed, prepares us for future growth.”
Microsoft Business Solutions
Microsoft Business Solutions offers integrated business applications and services that allow small and mid-sized organizations and divisions of large enterprises to connect employees, customers, and suppliers for improved efficiency. The financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and analytics applications work with Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office and Windows® to streamline processes across an entire organization, giving businesses insight to respond rapidly, plan strategically, and execute quickly. Microsoft Business Solutions are delivered through a worldwide network of channel partners that provide specialized services and local support tailored to a company’s needs.
For more information about Microsoft Business Solutions, go to: