Winning over with our proALPHA and Inxmail interface expertise

KÖHL GmbH:

• Development and manufacture of office seats

SMARTCRM at KÖHL:

• CRM replacement
• 36 licenses
• Interfaces to proALPHA ERP and proALPHA DMS
• Connection to Inxmail Professional
• Deployment in sales field and back office as well as in marketing

Requirements and Project Goals:

• Central access of the employees to all customer-related information in one system
• Standard interface to proALPHA ERP and proALPHA DMS as well as to Inxmail professional
• Manifold BI evaluations in the CRM system
• Optimized field service integration
• Management of marketing features and convenient target group selection

From now on, the KÖHL GmbH relies on our CRM solution, SMARTCRM, in sales and marketing. The company, headquartered in Rödermarkt, Germany, has been developing and manufacturing ergonomically high-quality office swivel chairs, conference chairs and side chairs.

KÖHL was already using its in-house CRM solution. However, this was mainly used to create visit reports by the field staff and could not meet the requirements of a modern and informative CRM. For this reason, the company decided to introduce a new CRM system. Given that they have already been using the ERP and the DMS solutions of proALPHA, we impressed with our standard interfaces to both systems as well as our long-standing interface know-how. Our mobile solutions, thanks to which the field staff’s integration is to be optimized, as well as the clear presentation of all important information on the SMARTCRM start screen also scored points in the decision-making process.

One of the goals of the implementation is to remove isolated applications and thus optimize all-round access to transaction data, such as customer sales trends, for the field staff. Easy with SMARTCRM: our CRM solution bundles all customer-related information in one system. Thus, data from the previously used CRM in-house solution as well as a call center software were taken over at once. Via standard interfaces, we connect SMARTCRM to the ERP and DMS systems of proALPHA. With the DMS interface, documents archived there will be directly accessible in SMARTCRM. Conversely, files stored in the CRM system can also be transferred to proALPHA DMS at the press of a button.

From proALPHA ERP, SMARTCRM will automatically transfer customers, prospects, contacts, offers, products (and product groups), marketing features as well as figures such as sales and order backlog items and open items. Prepared in a variety of BI analyses and enriched with previous year’s values, the figures are also available to the sales force. This is because they can now access all CRM information via notebook – even offline. On their smartphones, the SMARTCRM.App provides them with all relevant customer data. In this way, the sales representatives can keep track of sales trends and products already purchased at all times, even on the way to the customer, and can act in a targeted manner during the visit. Afterwards, the visit report can be immediately recorded in the system, for example via voice recognition, so that the colleagues in the office are also informed promptly.

As KÖHL works primarily with specialized trade partners and wholesalers, clear project tracking is therefore particularly important. In the SMARTCRM project file, all contacts involved as well as the entire corresponding communication are summarized. E-mails are also automatically transferred from Microsoft Outlook, so that all activities remain fully traceable. If KÖHL provides a customer with several sample chairs as part of a sales project, the overview is also maintained here, as all sample chairs are managed in the CRM solution. Quotations are imported from proALPHA ERP and archived in the respective project file. Overviews on the SMART Board, the start screen of SMARTCRM, show sales staff the quotations to be followed up at any time.

In addition, the SMART Board offers KÖHL numerous other possibilities. The information displayed there is user-specific. This way all employees see all data important for their daily work, such as current target achievement, the tasks due on a daily basis or the plus-minus lists of the customers they are in charge of.

The marketing department will also benefit from SMARTCRM. Previously, the features used for marketing campaigns were maintained in proALPHA. Now, this will be taken over into SMARTCRM and assigned to addresses and contacts there. If necessary, new features can be created and linked in the CRM system. Thanks to the manifold filter options, the marketing employees can now rapidly select the suitable target group for a mailing, for instance. The creation of a personalized mailing template as well as the dispatch take place in the e-mail marketing solution Inxmail Professional. The system is connected to SMARTCRM by a standard interface, so that the selected contacts can be transferred to Inxmail with a click. The management and use of the recipient information naturally complies to the GDPR in both systems.