In 2017, the hardening company Gerster AG decided to introduce SMARTCRM. Since 1950, the Swiss company with headquarters in Egerkingen has been involved in the sector of hardening and heat treatment technology. Till now, the family-run company has continually grown into an established, medium-sized business with about 110 employees and has been offering all conventional heat treatment processes.
Thanks to the CRM support in sales back office and field service, Gerster pursued the optimization of internal sales processes, a more efficient and more effective customer care as well as increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
In addition, vital for the company was the following
- the bundling of all important customer-related information and agreements,
- a fully up-to-date and central panoramic view,
- 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,
- as a mid-sized partner “at eye level”
- and with the competent support in the decision process.
Our CRM solution scored with its high flexibility, thanks to which customer-specific adaptation requirements could also be implemented, as well as the interface to the ERP system AMS. Indeed, SMARTCRM imports over the interface:
- addresses,
- products (treatment processes),
- figures,
- quotation hit rate,
- quotations as pdf file including positions.
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 or per treatment process. Therefore, it is easier for the employees to display, for example customer sales trends or to recognize changes in the process requirements.
The field staff has also access to these data when on the go
- via offline access on their notebook
- or online using SMARTCRM.App.
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. This is how the processes are made more independent and more efficient.
