The Business Process:
A national retailer has some 50 offices located around the mainland United States. The company employs nearly 4,000 people in a wide range of functions, and employs a full-service IT staff of 25. In addition to selling brand new items, the organization also sells high-end used, or previously owned, products, and employs a team of 50 purchasers nationwide, that do not work out of any regional offices - instead these buyers work on the road from laptop computers.
The Problem:
The used-item buyers use a variety of sources to locate products of interest, including newspaper classified ads and internet websites. Often, more than one used buyer will contact the same seller about the same item at the same time, an event which creates unhealthy competition for the purchase of the product between buyers, and raises the sale price of the item in question as well - both negative outcomes. There are many times when buyers will encounter the same item at different times as well, and in this case, the first buyer has passed on the item - a situation where the second buyer will likely do the same - a situation that results in lost time for the company, as the second (and maybe third and fourth buyers) have duplicated dead-end efforts. The company tried using spreadsheets and emails sent back and forth between buyers, but a single spreadsheet updated by 50 buyers proved chaotic and slow at best.
The Solution:
Argot Systems custom-built a web-based customer relationship management tool, or CRM, to address this organization's specific problem. The organization could have had their in-house IT staff build this soultion, but instead opted to have them trained to manage a solution built outside of the company, in order to save on in-house development time, and productivity on current projects. The CRM allowed the used buyers to check a centralized database of sellers and items before spending time traveling to locations to inspect items for sale. Used buyers could type in a seller phone number and find a seller history, if any existed, saving time if other buyers had already visited the seller and inspected the product. Further, if a buyer was currently on location or negotiating a purchase, another buyer that was interested in the item could type in the seller phone number to discover that the purchase was already in-progress, as opposed to showing up on location and competing for the purchase with another buyer. The CRM not only streamlined and improved this business process, but also saved the company thousands of dollars in hardware: the CRM was built to work with Smartphones and PDA's. Instead of spending $2000 on a laptop for a buyer, the company bought $300 PDAs, which were easier for the buyers to use in the field. The centralized database and application were seamlessly integrated into the IT team's existing network, making maintenance and administration a simple task.
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