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Sales & Marketing

INCREASED CUSTOMER RETENTION AND MARGIN

CUSTOMER

Renowned Energy Supplier

CHALLENGE

Due to the open market, competition is fierce resulting in low customer retention rates.

GOAL

Improve customer retention rate while improving margin.

SOLUTION

Decision Intelligence For Sales & Marketing

Supporting the agent with personalized offers which are optimized for both margin and conversion. These are offered with context, at the right moment in the process. This way the right decisions can be made to protect revenue and margin. As business impact is key, we applied hyper focus on trust, convenience and speed, resulting in a simple UI, with a very high user adoption.


Underlying AI's as part of the decision model:

•Churn Risk Prediction

•Prediction of Customer Lifetime Value

•Prediction of the cost-to-serve

•Personalized offer selection: Top 3 offers with highest chance to be converted while protecting margin;

IMPACT

Multi digit growth of the customer retention rate and margin.

Important

1. Involve the business  to get the right problem statement and domain expertise

2. To impact the outcome like the bottom line, you need to involve the different stakeholders and the capability to optimize multiple objectives at the same time (retention and total margin)

3. Find the right balance between human and artificial intelligence.

Systems Involved: 

- ERP: Order data > products & services, recensy, frequency, monetary value, payment behaviour, 

- CRM: Customer data  like type, location, NPS

- Service: Complaints and number of hours worked per customer 

Result

Due to accurate predictions about who will leave and their customer lifetime value, we could pick the ones that need a specific treatment. Even more, we predicted which offer would be relevant to keep them onboard while keeping the margin at the same or higher level, boosting the total margin.

DETECT THE BEST PROSPECTS AND BOOST ACQUISITION

INDUSTRY

Medical Devices

CHALLENGE

Creating marketing campaigns that result in business.

Today, too much time and resources are spend on the wrong prospects and prospects are bombarded with irrelevant offers, decreasing the absolute conversion.

Campaigns are built on gut feeling.

GOAL

Detect the prospects with the most potential and convert them with the most relevant offer.

Setup campaigns that will help in the best way to achieve the business goals.

SOLUTION

Decision Intelligence For Sales & Marketing

1) Finding the best prospects

Algorithms find patterns, within data which is also available on prospects, about what is defining today's best customers. These patterns are then applied to a large list of prospects where the ones with the most potential get the best score. Hereby a split is made between customers with and without engagement data like social and or click data.

In the next step, algorithms are used to determine the top offers to convert these prospects to customers.

This information is then split over sales and marketing to take the right action.


2) Effective campaigns

A three-step approach is followed. 

Step 1: Determine the list of potential offers by including and/or excluding potential offers

Step 2: Algorithms determine the top offers per customer and or prospects in such a way that the targets can be achieved faster.

Step 3: As marketing only wants to create a limited number of campaigns, an algorithm will score the offers. In combination with marketing intelligence and goals, marketing selects the best offers whereby the score is one but an important element.

IMPACT

Faster and better growth due to effective marketing campaigns that create good sales opportunities and have a high return.

Important

1. Involve the business  to get the right problem statement and domain expertise

2. To impact the outcome like the bottom line, you need to involve the different stakeholders and the capability to optimize multiple objectives at the same time (retention and total margin)

3. Find the right balance between human and artificial intelligence.

Systems Involved: 

- ERP: Order data > products & services, recensy, frequency, monetary value, payment behaviour, 

- CRM: Customer data  like type, location, NPS

- Service: Complaints and number of hours worked per customer 

Result

Due to accurate predictions about who will leave and their customer lifetime value, we could pick the ones that need a specific treatment. Even more, we predicted which offer would be relevant to keep them onboard while keeping the margin at the same or higher level, boosting the total margin.

TENDER SCORING

CHALLENGE

Responding to tenders comes with three major challenges:

1) It involves many working hours and only a relative small portion are won. The related cost of lost tenders is within the millions of euros.

2) It is unknown why some tenders are won and others lost. So during the pre-tendering process, almost nothing is done to influence it such that the chance of winning the tender improves.

3)The missed opportunity cost is huge. If the time spent on lost tenders could have been spend on those tenders or deals with a high chance of winning, revenue and margin would get a double digit growth. 

GOAL

1) Improve win rate

2) Learn why deals are won to drive effective pre-tendering

3) Save time on deals that would otherwise been lost and invest this time on new deals.

SOLUTION

Decision Intelligence For Sales & Marketing

Historical order data is enriched with external data like financial company information, human inputs like how good the relationship is and location.

Azelis speeds up sales and logistics

Azelis is a leading global speciality chemicals distributor. The company has grown rapidly over recent years over recently years, and now comprises almost 40 distribution companies in Europe, Australia, Canada, India and China, with more than 2,000 suppliers and 50,000 customers. An IT systems upgrade was therefore more than welcome.

Faster sales and logistics

Because Azelis is globally active, its sales and logistics departments need pricing documents and product information sheets in twenty different languages. Cnext performed a thorough requirements analysis and implemented an application to generate documents, seamlessly integrated with Azelis’ ERP system. Salespeople can now process orders faster because they have instant access to the right information in a format they expect, and logistics partners can deliver to customers faster too.

Strict export regulations

Legislation prevents some organisations and companies from receiving chemical products, and it used to be very labour intensive for Azelis to check if customers or suppliers were on the so-called blacklist. Cnext integrated an ‘export on demand’ application for Azelis to trace orders automatically, stopping any that don’t satisfy the regulations. This saves Azelis a substantial amount of time, with the application processing around 430,000 transactions a year.

Standardised EDI platform

In order to work faster, more efficiently and more securely with customers, suppliers and logistics partners, Azelis needed an EDI system to meet international standards, with each department being able to manage it themselves. Cnext therefore implemented an EDI platform with Microsoft BizTalk Server, and integrated it with Azelis’ ERP system. All Azelis’ purchasing and sales transactions now run seamlessly via the platform.
Project Manager, Pam Reay from Azelis: “Cnext helps us on several levels. The professionalism and reliability of employees is particularly notable. They always deliver high-quality work within the agreed time, and document our requirements in great detail to ultimately develop high-quality interfaces.”

ISOPROC: Reorganising sales and marketing means more than just a new CRM package

It’s very tempting to use a new CRM package implementation as an excuse to reorganise the sales and marketing department, and the latest generation of CRM software can indeed do a lot more than it could ten years ago, but limiting the introduction of new features will end in disappointment sooner or later. Implementation must support new sales marketing processes too, which in turn have to the support the business strategy.

Lost control

Just ask Isoproc. This rapidly expanding organisation, in the equally fast growing insulation and air-sealing sector, had lost some perspective and control of its data and processes. “I could give you various examples of where things could’ve been better,” explains Arnout Ulenaers, Marketing Director for Isoproc: “Shared managed mailboxes that weren’t being monitored, for instance, or the three Excel files we needed to organise training which weren’t the same as the customer database.”

One intervention was to split the organisation into two divisions: Isoproc Solutions and Isoproc Innoviso. Then a more customer-focused approach was implemented, so customer contacts are followed up properly and no information ever goes missing. It makes sense to pair this with new CRM software.

CRM partner sought

Cnext’s unique approach made an immediate impression on Isoproc’s search for the right partner to install the CRM software, as Arnout Ulenaers recalls: “The workshops didn’t start by focusing on the CRM package; we started from nothing. The entire organisation and all its business processes were examined, which showed up some aspects that were fine, but also some aspects that were under-developed and needed improvement.”

The matter of choosing a CRM package only arose at the end of this process. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online was decided upon because it met the very specific objectives, according to Arnout Ulenaers: “Firstly, it offers a targeted approach to the market; an architect is not a consumer, so a very different approach is required. Secondly, it results in a much better customer experience with as few internal transfers as possible. And thirdly, we have a much better understanding of and relationships within the market.” The software chosen provides all of this and more, including relevant and convenient management dashboards, and support for mobile employees.

More than just whistles and bells

Isoproc has been given everything it asked for and more. It now has software that can be modified quickly to adapt to a new approach or economic conditions. And above all, thanks to the thorough preparation prior to the implementation, it has a solution that matches its business strategy. This is only possible if you choose the right partner for your project; someone who doesn’t just use whistles and bells to try to convince you. Arnout Ulenaers was aware of this when he opted for Cnext: “The decisive factor that ultimately helped us opt for Cnext was that they ‘got’ us: they fully understood our complex reorganisation and that gave us confidence for our future collaboration.”

N-Allo: Happier Customers 

Cnext helps N-Allo with customer services via the cloud

Contact centre N-Allo wanted to offer even more channels for interacting with customers alongside telephone, email and chat. This was made possible with an app for end users called ‘I want help’.

‘Anyone who downloads the app to their smartphone or tablet has access to a kind of self-service page where you can look up invoices and balances, for example, or find answers to frequently asked questions,’ explains Bernard Questiaux, Business Architect at N-Allo. ‘And if that’s not enough for the customer to resolve their query, they can contact the contact centre straight from the app.’

An experienced partner

‘It’s very hard to predict how much traffic an app like this will generate,’ adds Questiaux, ‘which makes it difficult to determine what infrastructure you need. The solution for this lies the cloud, but that’s something we didn’t have much experience of. We therefore wanted to find a partner to support us, so that we didn’t have to go through the whole learning process ourselves; we simply didn’t have enough time for that.’

N-Allo chose to work with Cnext, who they’d already collaborated with on previous projects. Bernard Questiaux: ‘They have the experience and flexibility we need with a desire to help us progress, even though the final destination isn’t always very clear at the outset. They also have the right contacts at Microsoft. All this ensured a great collaboration and successful project.’

Cnext proposed using Windows Azure as a cloud solution. This was a logical choice for N-Allo considering it employs around twenty developers who specialise in Microsoft technology.

Stronger competitive position

The fact that N-Allo now has certain services running in the cloud brings all kinds of benefits with it. ‘Firstly we’ve strengthened our competitive position,’ says Bernard Questiaux. ‘We’re available consistently on various channels, so end users have more choice about how to contact us. This is an added extra that is available to our existing and future customers. Secondly, it’s an all-in-one solution; maintenance costs are substantially reduced because we no longer need to invest in a powerful but expensive infrastructure. We also no longer need to worry about servicing or security; everything is arranged very conveniently so we can focus on our core activity. Thirdly, it didn’t take long to complete the whole transition; the entire project was finished in just six weeks, from first sketch to the launch of ‘I want help’. Finally, we longer need to worry about possible peak times; we can easily adjust our capacity according to demand at any time.’

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