Situation
The Dutch wholesale company Mid Ocean Brands with 350 employees markets 4,500 promotional products from the Far East throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The products are administered in warehouses from where they are directly sold to specialised distributors. Up until now, stock information retrievals and the placing of orders were possible either via a call centre (during regular business hours) or via the MOB website.
The sellers of the MOB products often do not have access to the Internet at the customers’. To make sure that they can nevertheless obtain information about the current stock at any time, the company started looking for an SMS-based solution. The objectives were to minimise waiting times, reduce work load at the call centre and facilitate real-time retrievals of stock information.
Challenge
“We were looking for a solution to reduce the workload of our call centres and to offer our customers a faster and more comfortable service. It is important to our customers that up-to-date information is available at any time, even without access to the Internet, in order to be able to sell their products successfully. Thanks to the SMS solution we can now save resources at the call centre and offer our customers an unrivalled service,” explains Diederik de Koning, Marketing Director at MOB.
Solution
TOPCALL developed a SMS solution integrated with SAP. After having registered once, the sales representatives can send a stock information retrieval to MOB at the valid local tariff of their mobile phone provider. It does not matter where the customer is located – the number stays the same in all countries. The reply is free of charge and is sent directly to the mobile phone within minutes. This makes it possible for the sales representatives of the distributors to immediately inform their customers on site whether or not the desired items are on stock and, if requested, also to place orders immediately. It is also possible to internally distribute important information via SMS, such as current sales figures.
Results
The project was implemented remarkably fast. The system was developed in August 2005 and started in November of the same year. In the first two months alone, 60 major customers registered for this innovative and unique service. The customers were pleased with the shorter waiting times at the call centre, the 24-hour SMS service and ultimately also with the faster closing of contracts and their satisfied end customers.