Härterei Gerster AG

In 2017, Gerster AG decided to implement SMARTCRM. Thanks to the CRM support, internal sales processes in field and back office should be optimized in order to be able to guarantee a more efficient and more effective customer care – and therefore to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. Given the numerous interfaces to customers, bundling all important customer-related information and agreements was a goal of great importance for Gerster. The CRM system should provide the employees with a fully up-to-date and central panoramic view of these data. In addition, the CRM implementation should guarantee an optimal tracking of leads from the initial contact to the outgoing offer up to the order. When reaching a decision, we convinced as a CRM manufacturer, a mid-sized partner “at eye level” as well as with competent support in the decision process. Our CRM solution scored with its high flexibility, thanks to which Gerster’s customer-specific adaptation requirements could also be implemented.

Interface to AMS

Another great advantage for Gerster was the interface to the implemented ERP system AMS. Via this interface, SMARTCRM imports addresses, products (treatment processes), figures material – such as turnover positions, open items and payment practices – as well as the quotation hit rate and quotations as pdf file including positions. The latter, including their positions, are automatically stored in the corresponding CRM customer file and thus remain traceable and exploitable at all times. The diverse BI features in SMARTCRM are used to analyze the figures and to make them available at different levels, such as per customer or per product/treatment process. Therefore, it is easier for the employees to display, for example customer sales trends or to recognize changes in the process requirements.
Thanks to the bidirectional interface, SMARTCRM exports data to AMS and therefore simplifies the process for creating a customer based on the prospective customer’s data already recorded.

Constantly up-to-date in the field

Before the introduction of SMARTCRM, the analyses of figures were still laboriously compiled in numerous Microsoft Excel spreadsheets which were neither up-to-date nor always available to everyone. Today, the information is available to the field staff just before a customer visit at the press of a button on their screen – when on the go either through offline access on their notebooks or online using SMARTCRM.App.
In addition, employees are kept informed on possible agreements, open quotations or customer requests already treated by colleagues at a glance into the activity history and can react accordingly during the visit. Indeed, thanks to the integration of Microsoft Outlook, important e-mails of the customer can be conveniently added to the corresponding activity history. The CTI connection facilitates calling directly from the customer file.

More efficient processes even for back office

If field employees document a customer visit in the CRM system and create tasks for colleagues, all this information is available to the office staff in real time. In the past, for instance, they used to have to take into account the presence of field service colleague when preparing quotations, but now, SMARTCRM is rendering their processes more independent and more efficient.

Benefits also for the marketing department

SMARTCRM is also used in marketing at Gerster. There, the employees benefit from the wide range of selection options, enabling, for example, the right target group to be addressed when sending invitation to a trade fair. Mailings are also sent directly from SMARTCRM and feedback is documented in the contact file.

Outlook

In the future, in addition to sales and marketing, Gerster would like to connect more departments to the CRM system. This should be supported by targeted adjustments to improve the user experience. Furthermore, the possibilities of the module SMARTCRM.GeoMap should be used for planning visits.