HSS Hire Services chose Serversys to help build closer relationships with customers

Record keeping was primarily maintained through the retail operation system SPANNER a bespoke branch focused back office system that provides revenue tracking facilities on customer accounts. If HSS Hire Services was to achieve enhanced sales and achieve greater complicity with its customers, it needed to implement and evolve a sophisticated CRM platform that could interact with SPANNER.

Mike Kemp, Sales Director at HSS Hire Services outlines the challenge he faced:

“Our objective was to improve the visibility of customer interactions across the company and enable improved territory management. We wanted to give our sales people a clearer vision of their individual sales universes and by giving Area Managers better quality and depth of information about their customers and prospects, we hoped to enable them to achieve against new, highly defined key performance indicators. Longer term, this would help us to identify and respond faster to customer opportunities.”

A further advantage of the new system would be access to data-rich customised reports, as Mike explains:

“Implementing a CRM system would give us ease of access to consistent, accurate reporting. We wanted the new system to automatically generate activity reporting for Area Sales and National Account managers; removing the burden of administration that’s traditionally associated with manual reporting, our sales personnel were able to reinvest this energy and time into proactive account and territory development activities.”

Although HSS recognised it had a deficiency in CRM, its existing investment in operational systems had to be incorporated into the solution it selected.

“SPANNER is very much the heartbeat of our business we had to ensure that the CRM system we chose offered full and comprehensive integration with this crucial operational and financial platform,”

Selecting the solution

After undertaking an initial outline of system requirements, Mike Kemp and his team began the search for potential solution providers. The selection process was extensive. Potential solution providers were assessed against a 15-point key requirements matrix devised by HSS Hire Services. Of the contenders, Serversys ultimately met all required criteria.

“You only implement CRM once,”

“To give sales people clarity, in terms of territory management objectives, we needed to work with a solution provider that not only recommended the right CRM system in terms of functionality and Sage CRM MME certainly gave us the future-proofing, integration capabilities and feature rich operations we were seeking but also offered the ability to support us at the highest level throughout the implementation process and beyond.”

Building consistency

Key to this process would be ensuring that CRM data was inter-changeable with the SPANNER system. Relevant financial information had to be made available to users to enable financial performance monitoring while customer details, including group relationships, had to be available in CRM. Working with the development team at HSS Hire Services, it was agreed that an automated integration process would ensure SPANNER operated as a master data source. Synchronisation mechanisms would be developed by Serversys to ensure data integrity between the two systems and these data requirements were developed in consultation with the team at HSS Hire Services.