Dublin-based eTel provides corporate telecommunications services and Internet access to Central European countries whose telecoms infrastructure is being prepared for deregulation and competition.
Founded in 1999, eTel now has 12,000 corporate customers in three countries and makes use of a customer-relationship management system system developed with the help of Irish CRM specialist eWare.
ETel chose eWare because it felt that an Internet-based CRM solution offered the best fit for its current and future business needs. According to eTel’s chief information officer Catherine Sweeney: ‘Many organisations look for a CRM solution when they grow to a size where the absence of one is causing problems. We weren’t trying to address existing problems. We were looking to prevent future problems.
‘EWare’s main differentiator was that its solution is entirely Internet-based, using thin-client technology. That meant that we could have one server in Dublin with separate databases that each country could access via the Internet, there was no need to go to the expense of installing software in each location. This meant it was quick to install and to provide return on investment. We could also easily integrate it with our billing, financial system and data warehouse.’
EWare provides thin-client technology and eTel could therefore ensure that all its systems across all its areas of operation held the same customer information without any data duplication. Providing such a customer database has delivered many real benefits, according to Sweeney.
‘Because we have a proper customer database, we can target any customer, wherever they are to cross sell, up sell or campaign. For example, we gave our sales people in each country a new objective —t o cross sell to different customers across Central Europe. It was easy to produce a report via eWare that provided the sales people with the names of new customers signed up in the previous week within other regions. These became customers to whom they could prospect in their own countries.
‘EWare also enables us to set up a customer or to bill a customer immediately. This has reduced manual work for employees and increased workflow to customers, delivering better customer service and ensuring that we are not losing revenue. We knew from experience that the sooner you set a customer up in the billing system and the engineering switches on, the sooner they traffic, the sooner you offer them first class service and the sooner you start making money!’
System specification and implementation was helped by the fact that eWare’s team had telecommunications expertise and experience. The software provider was able to work closely with eTel to identify business processes and needs, to oversee the product rollout and to educate a CRM trainer.
Sweeney explains: ‘EWare’s professional services team spent time doing the business analysis, writing the process specifications, identifying typical life cycles, developing the customised version, implementing it, supporting the rollout across Central Europe and educating the trainer.
‘The end product currently provides prospecting, sales, order fulfilment, workflow, tracking, customer care ticketing, marketing and reporting functionality. All members of staff use it, including our sales, marketing, engineering, customer care and billing teams.’
Customisation
ETel also found that eWare’s thin client architecture allowed the system to be easily customised to suit their needs, says Sweeney: ‘EWare can develop ASP pages that sit alongside actual eWare modules and link in. We had screens developed for capturing information in this way and eWare’s team actually identified how to pass that information on to the billing system in the format that was required. They also configured our workflow processes to provide exactly what we needed.
‘The eWare CRM is also simple to customise in-house. This enables us to bring new products and services to market quickly. The system can be rapidly configured to include them whenever necessary.’
ETel acknowledge that they are unusual to be operating across three countries using a group structure where the management headquarters is outside all three areas of operation. Nevertheless, eTel’s corporate aim is to become one of the leading telcos across Central Europe. Part of its strategy is not to focus too much on anyone country, but to position itself s as a Central European business. This is something that eWare’s product has made possible. But to have such a system across such a geographical spread brought with it a number of cultural challenges. Each country had different ways of doing business. These needed to be taken on board.
Cultural complexities
Although eTel didn’t see the need to localise the screens for individual countries, it was essential to localise the data that was captured in each country. Because of laws, taxes and working culture, data flowing through the eWare CRM had to be captured differently.
‘The eWare team was very aware of such differences, identifying issues such as varying tax laws and the methods of selling and issuing contracts in each locality. This has been crucial to our success,’ said Sweeney.
As a web-based, open standards system, any Internet-enabled device, including mobile phones and PDAs, can easily access eWare.
The system also has Web self-service and campaign modules, as Sweeney explains: ‘We plan to adapt eWare’s campaign and Web self-service modules to enable better targeting, customer care self-service and e-billing.’
Regardless of future plans, in just a few months eTel successfully rolled out its CRM system across four countries- Ireland, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Each country is fully operational now and the entire history of every customer contact ever made, for all 1,200 customers, can be traced back to the day of initial contact.
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