Bell Canada is a leading provider of a wired and wireless voice and voiceless data communications, with local and long-distance phone services, high speed and wireless internet access, IP-broadband services, ebusiness solutions, and satellite television services – many of which could be used by the same customer.

Bell Canada is wholly owned by BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises), which operates Bell Canada Local Service, Bell Mobility wireless service, ExpressVu digital satellite television service, and Sympatico, a popular high-speed Internet portal. Along with its multifaceted service offerings, the enterprise is setting industry standards for voice over IP (VoIP), integrated voice and data messaging, and high-definition TV.

Setting the strategy
Bell Mobility, a division of Bell Canada Enterprises, implemented an Infor customer relationship management solution, Inbound Marketing, and worked with Infor to transform Bell Mobility’s two call centers – with a combined 550 customer service representatives (CSRs) – into selling centers.

Though wireless service is a main profit source for Bell Mobility, the only way to generate new revenue through existing customers is to cross-sell features and up-sell new rate plans. But with disparate business applications and databases and no formalised process for cross-selling or upselling, the CSRs could not easily recommend newer or more competitive products to inbound callers.

“We needed one integrated recommendation tool that would enable customer service representatives to sell our products across all lines of business, while still allowing us to support each line of business distinctively,” says Matteo Galvan, marketing manager, Bell Mobility.

The company's ultimate goal was to enhance the interaction among its CRM applications and maximise the value of each incoming call to create more personalised and profitable interactions with customers.

Getting business specific
To meet this challenge, the company’s marketing and customer service teams implemented Inbound Marketing from Infor for its abilities to create a single view of the customer; integrate data from multiple sources, including the context of an inbound call; and generate the most appropriate offer or informational message for the specific customer in real time. Simply put, the tool could support CSRs in improving sales.

Bell Mobility’s parent company, Bell Canada, chose Inbound Marketing to enhance over 50 call centre locations (including vendors). Bell Canada had a strategy to “become one company” in the eyes of the customer by selling integrated communications services, or “packages.” The packages allow customers to save money and gain convenience by combining their phone, Internet, and TV services and billing.

Because Bell Canada’s call centers used multiple independent applications, the company needed a solution based on a flexible, service-oriented architecture to align data from various sources and deliver more personalised marketing offers.

Bell Canada also planned to make its website a more robust self-service portal, where customers could review their bills and account history. When customers logged in, they would be presented with pertinent offerings and promotions easily accessed with a click of the mouse.

“Driving more customers to our website is a big objective for us in the next few years,” says Owen Sonnenschein, associate director of CRM Development and

Implementation, Bell Canada. “So this brought us right back to needing to be able to create consistent customer experiences at each touch point across the company.”

Seeing results
The implementation took approximately ten months for Bell Mobility, and one year for the remaining areas. Training was relatively simple, according to Bell Canada. The company has 7,000 CSRs using the tool from coast to coast, and it plans to train an additional 3,000.

CSRs are also now more comfortable with selling complex product offerings, because they have all the details on their desktops to walk customers through the new services and value-added benefits. Since implementing Inbound Marketing from Infor, Bell Canada has unified distributed services and simplified business processes for greater operational efficiency, dramatically increasing one of its most important metrics, average revenues per call.

With Inbound Marketing, inbound calls are handled more efficiently, because the system immediately identifies customers from their phone numbers; analyses dozens of customer attributes such as transactional, demographic, and usage data; and immediately presents CSRs with the most appropriate offers for a specific customer.

Prior to using Inbound Marketing from Infor, the marketing team needed several days to assemble customer promotional campaigns and distribute them to CSRs.

Because campaign components are now integrated within a single web-based application, it is easier and quicker to launch offers. As a result, the time to distribute promotional campaigns improved by 75 percent, reducing the time to execute campaigns from 4 days to 4 hours. Six months after implementation, CSRs had increased new offer sales to inbound callers by 18 percent.

It paid off, with a more than 50 percent response rate to offers; the industry average is 35 percent. “When we initially started, we were looking at a 10-15 percent response rate, so this is a huge increase,” Sonnenschein adds.

“Inbound Marketing has helped us remain competitive. Our customer service representatives can now easily determine whether customers qualify for services and extend the right set of offers and promotions. Basically, we are taking the data and information that we normally gather about our customers and using it to market back to them.”

The company’s investment in Inbound Marketing from Infor has already paid for itself and only requires a small administration team. Sonnenschein says, “With Inbound Marketing, all of our metrics are up and we have increased our ability to sell to customers. That is success.”

Being open to an enterprising future
In addition to providing better service to existing customers, Bell Canada plans to expand usage of Inbound Marketing to create more targeted offers to new customers. “Infor's Inbound Marketing gives us complete flexibility to change marketing offers quickly, which is especially important on the wireless side,” Galvan concludes. The company’s marketing team will continue to take advantage of being able to extend new offers based on market shifts or bids from competitors.

For more information

EMDA NZ Ltd
Ph: + 64 3 379 9530
Ph: + 64 9 623 3001

Web: www.emda.co.nz
email: info@emda.co.nz

About Infor
Infor delivers business-specific software to enterprising organisations. With experience built in, Infor’s solutions enable businesses of all sizes to be more enterprising and adapt to the rapid changes of a global marketplace. With more than 70,000 customers, Infor is changing what businesses expect from an enterprise software provider. For additional information, visit www.infor.com.

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