Providing quality customer service has always been key to the success of any business and, for TheMIGroup, a Toronto-based provider of relocation and assignment management programs, technology is proving to be a key enabler of customer service excellence.
The MIGroup, a global relocation company that conducts 17,000 relocations annually, 60 per cent of them international, has worked with Illumiti Group, a Richmond Hill, Ont.-based systems integration and management consulting company and an SAP partner, to implement a number of SAP AG (NYSE: SAP)- based systems including customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning.
In a presentation at the recent Toronto stop of the SAP World Tour, Joanne Hodge, vice-president and CIO at TheMIGroup, outlined the company’s five-year experience with SAP and it’s latest project completed with Illumiti: an external portal for the companies that contract it to provide relocation services, as well as the employees that they’re moving.
Five years ago, Hodge explained, the senior management team decided to replace its legacy systems with a platform that would carry it into the future.
“We were looking for a globally-integrated platform because, with 11 offices worldwide, we want everyone looking at the same information in all offices,” said Hodge. “We wanted software that could support standard business processes, while having flexibility for clients that have their own reporting requirements.”
TheMIGroup worked with Illumiti to implement SAP-based CRM, ERM and Business Warehouse systems. The next step in the process came 18 months ago when the company decided to replace its old portal, accessed both by their employer clients and by the workers they’re hired to move, with a customizable, secure, easy-to-use self-service portal. Hodge said their requirements also included ad hoc reporting, integration with their SAP backend, and an out of the box turnkey solution.
Dubbed ReloWeb, the resulting portal is based on SAP R/3, SAP Enterprise Portal and Crystal Dashboard Design. SAP Business Objects InfoView is used to provide standard reports.
Hodge said the new portal is available 24/7, provides standard, easy to print reports, gives users access to more information than before, and streamlines business processes for TheMIGroup staff.
“It has really given us a competitive advantage in our marketplace,” said Hodge.
Quoting an Aberdeen Group report, Dror Orbach, Illumiti’s COO, said there is a marked correlation between companies with measures improvement in customer service and their ability to drive sales and generate profit improvement.
He said there’s an extreme difference between best-in-class companies and the rest of the pack in end-user satisfaction. Best-in-class companies are well above average in response time, easy of use and other measures. Customer expectations are rising.
They expect companies to be easier and quicker to interact with. For example, if a customer is interacting with a company via chat through a Web self-service portal, they don’t want to have to recount their issue from scratch if they shift over to a phone interaction.
“This may sound trivial, but it’s not easy (from a technology perspective) for a lot of companies,” said Orbach. “The customer doesn’t care about transactional systems and silos needing to updated in real time. It just needs to happen.”
The key, said Orbach, isn’t just providing management-level employees with better information. It’s the line-level, customer-facing employees that deliver customer service, and empowering them to deliver better customer service through better access to information is what makes a best-in-class company.
Follow Jeff Jedras on Twitter: @JeffJedrasCDN.