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PROBLEM: Over a thousand sales leads come in daily via the Internet. Leads and customer data are stored in multiple, sometimes redundant, systems that are not tightly integrated. Existing customer information is not easily accessible by field sales people when traveling. Although inside Sales depends on Onyx Customer Center for managing customer information, the Customer Relations group was not using Onyx to track service incidents. A small IT staff needs to empower end users in Sales and Customer Relations to reduce the dependency on IT for reporting and day-to-day business needs. SOLUTION: Interviewed representatives of all functional areas within Sales and Customer Relations (Inside Sales, Field Sales, Telephone Qualifiers, Channel Sales, International Sales and Customer Relations) to determine day-to-day business needs, how current systems map to those needs, and areas for improvement. We customized Onyx Customer Center to help the Customer Relations group manage service incidents in the same system used by Sales, and provided Excel-based reports for tracking service call and e-mail statistics. We also provided simple tools (based on Excel and VBA) that allowed Sales and Customer Relations to manage Onyx drop-down lists without having to enlist IT assistance. This let the various organization run their internal business practices with less dependency on IT. In addition, we ran automated processes to archive old or invalid leads in the Onyx SQL Server database, and developed plans to optimize lead gathering from the Internet, to reduce the heavy load on the production database. Finally, we developed custom Exchange folders and Outlook forms to enable Sales to manage reference account summaries and key account information, so that the information could easily be viewed and maintained 'off-line' during business trips. TECHNOLOGIES: Onyx Customer Center 4.0 Allaire Cold Fusion Studio 4.0 SQL Server 6.5 administration and stored procedure development Microsoft Exchange 5.5, CDO, and scripting agent Microsoft Outlook 98\2000 custom form development and VBA Return to Main Client List
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