IODA
Leading digital music distribution company improves customer communications and management visibility with Thinking Phone Networks coherent customer communications platform.
IODA is a digital music distribution firm that needed a way to better manage their sales activity and customer interactions. Ioda’s distributed worldwide sales force lacked a consistent and centralized set of communications and management tools. The operations team was providing service to over 7,500 customers, but faced challenges with quickly identifying customers calling in, and efficiently finding account specific information. Management wanted improved visibility into sales activity and the ability to track customer interactions at a very fine grained level of detail. To improve their customer communications and management, IODA implemented Thinking Phone Networks C3, including Voice and Communicator modules, and the CRM and Analytics management modules. Now all sales personnel are part of the same company wide communications platform. Integration within the C3 platform provides operations personnel with screen pops whenever customers call in that automatically pulls up relevant account and contact information. Managers now have access to a sales management dashboard that track a set of key performance indicators (KPIs). As a result, the sales team can communicate more effectively with prospects and customers, the operations team can handle customer inquiries more efficiently, and management has the reporting visibility they need to better manage their business.
Situation
IODA is a digital music distribution company headquartered in San Francisco with remote branch offices around the world. The company represents independent music labels and provides a platform to process and distribute digital media to digital retail sites. They have enjoyed considerable growth and success to date and currently serve many thousands of customers.
IODA’s successful business growth was not without its challenges. In particular, as the customer base grew, there was a clear need for a management application to manage sales activity and ongoing customer interactions. The sales team is a geographically distributed organization with many of the sales personnel working out of small branch and remote home offices. There were no tools for automating outbound activity, and there also was no centrally managed system to track sales activity and opportunities.
The support team is based out of the San Francisco headquarters location. Their main challenge was that they had a large number of smaller independent labels as customers. When customers called in, it was difficult to determine who was calling, and to pull up all the relevant customer information. They had no way to record call details in a way which could be accessed by other team members.
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"Before, our phone system was an island with no integration to our other systems... Now, we have a wealth of customer information right from the time the phone starts ringing. |
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Steve Bronstein, COO IODA |
The lack of standardized tools in the sales and operations teams had a direct impact on the quality of the reports available to the management team. In most cases the needed data simply wasn’t available. What was needed was a set of detailed activity reports that would track lead conversion, sales pipeline, opportunities being worked on, and post sales customer interactions with the operations team. Management wanted a set of high level reports providing key performance indicators that could be used to make business decisions.
Solution
IODA began researching solutions, and quickly found that while there were individual solutions that either addressed communications needs, or customer management needs, only Thinking Phone Networks C3 addressed all their requirements on a single platform. The fact that a single platform could meet their needs was critical, as they did not want to spend a lot of time integrating disparate systems together. Steve Bronstein, the COO of IODA explains “We went looking for pre-integrated solutions as we wanted all of our internal developers and resources to stay focused on our core business. Given our requirements, we quickly narrowed down to a couple of large enterprise premise based systems, and Thinking Phone Networks C3. The integration between the Voice, Communicator, CRM, and Analytics modules in the Thinking Phone Networks C3 is unique. Each of these is valuable in its own right, but combined on a single platform they deliver tremendous business value. All this without the integration work required of the premise based options.”
Working with Thinking Phone Networks, a 2 phase plan was put in place, where phase 1 was a deployment of the C3 Voice and Communicator modules intended to standardize the communications systems for all employees, including the remote, home office based users. Once the communications modules were in place, phase 2 would implement the CRM and Analytics management application modules to provide additional end user efficiency and management visibility.
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"The integration between the Voice, Communicator, CRM, and Analytics modules in the Thinking Phone Networks C3 is unique. Each of these is valuable in its own right, but combined on a single platform they deliver tremendous business value. |
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Steve Bronstein, COO IODA |
C3 Voice deployed for IODA is a fully featured hosted IP PBX. Polycom IP 301 and 501 handsets were deployed to all the IODA end users including all the remote and international users. As part of the deployment, end users received access to all the advanced features of a modern PBX including voicemail, auto-attendants, call forwarding, voicemail to email, integrated conferencing, fax to email, ring groups, and more. A critical part of the deployment was to ensure proper Quality of Service (QoS) for voice traffic on the network. Thinking Phones employs QoS enabled network devices and internet connections to ensure business grade voice quality for all voice deployments.
In addition to voice services, Thinking Phones also deployed the C3 Communicator module for IODA by deploying communicator software to its end users. C3 Communicator is an integrated enterprise instant messaging, presence, and soft phone platform, that was installed on end user workstations and laptops as part of the rollout. End users now have the ability to interact with customers and each other via a secure IM client that has pre-configured rosters for internal IODA users. They also have integrated presence information so they can see who is on the phone, out of the office, etc. Lastly, the integrated soft phone is used by IODA’s mobile salesforce who use it from their laptops to stay in touch with while on the road.
With customer communications standardized on Thinking Phone Networks C3, the second rollout phase was focused on management modules. C3 CRM is a web based application that provides a central customer database and tools for managing sales, marketing, and customer interactions. IODA’s marketing, sales, and operations personnel use the CRM module to store their customer information, including all phone and email interactions. Marketing now tracks their leads in the system, and conduct outbound email campaigns to generate activity. As leads turn into opportunities, sales has a central place to track the deals they are working on. Sales personnel use the click to call integration features to automate outbound lead contact. And finally, operations has a system of record for managing all their customer interactions. Integration between the Voice and CRM modules provides screen pop ups with relevant customer information as calls come in.
C3 Analytics was rolled out to meet IODA’s management visibility requirements. C3 Analytics provides web based enterprise business intelligence capabilities in the C3 platform, including executive management dashboards, relational reporting, ad-hoc reporting, and advanced data analysis (OLAP). C3 Analytics is pre-integrated with all the C3 communications and management modules, so IODA avoided all the typical work required to productionalize and integrate a business intelligence platform into their environment. Managers now have access to dashboards and reports which summarize sales activity and customer interactions, and help them make decisions about their business.
Benefits
IODA has realized successfully greater benefit as they continue to deploy C3 modules. By deploying the C3 Voice and Communicator modules, all employees in IODA's physically distributed environment were brought onto a common hosted communications platform. This immediately improved internal and customer communications, by providing a common set of communications tools. Users could 4 digit dial each other regardless of their physical location at no cost. Security and auditability was improved as IODA now had control over employee phone numbers, and can centrally manage voice and IM services for their user base via the C3 web portal. Management benefited from the consolidation of numerous communications vendors and providers to a single vendor and bill.
The sales and marketing teams also benefit from managing their activity on a common platform. C3 CRM allows users to access up to date customer information across the company. Platform integration allows for the automation of outbound email and call marketing campaigns which improves end user efficiency. By tracking leads from initial contact, to actively worked opportunities, to closed deals, management has vastly improved their visibility into sales. A sales management dashboard summarizes key performance indicators (KPIs) such as closed business by month, total amount of customer interaction time, and opportunity pipeline analysis. These tools have improved IODA’s ability to identify the best lead sources, accurately forecast revenue, and identify successful sales rep behavior.
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"Management visibility into sales activity customer interactions has taken a huge step forward with C3 Analytics. We now have a comprehensive view into what is happening pre and post sales, and can drill down to actual customer communications data when necessary. |
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Steve Bronstein, COO IODA |
The IODA operations team benefits from the integration between the Voice and CRM modules. As customers call in, screen pops in the CRM application are triggered which automatically pull up relevant customer records. IODA personnel can quickly determine who is calling, if there are any currently open issues, and record call notes. Given the size of their customer base, this integration was key to improving operational efficiency. Steve Bronstein says, “Before, our phone system was an island with no integration to our other systems. We never had any idea who was calling us. Now, we have a wealth of customer information right from the time the phone starts ringing.” Before, it was sometimes the case that very small customers would monopolize a disproportionate amount of the operations team time. Improved tracking of customer interactions allows IODA to prioritize customer support so the most important customers are serviced first.
The availability of improved information is not limited to operations personnel. According to Steve Bronstein, “Management visibility into sales activity customer interactions has taken a huge step forward with C3 Analytics. We now have a comprehensive view into what is happening pre and post sales, and can drill down to actual customer communications data when necessary.” This business intelligence capability that integrates communication and customer data is unique to Thinking Phone Networks C3. Management now has a set of KPIs available via highly refined dashboards, which can be used to make effective business decisions in sales, and operations.