Incentives essential for Bob, George and Babs
By Keith Newman - MIS NZ – November 2002
(see also - Roche -CRM Case Study - Hospital Division)
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Roche Products NZ Ltd has always been proud of its prescription medicine marketing program, but once SRD helped with focused training, both relationships and data improved - CRM Case Study
Encouraging salespeople to take professional training not only increased users’ willingness to embrace a customer relationship management (CRM) package, it significantly improved Roche New Zealand’s rapport with its customers.
The local arm of the global pharmaceutical company – founded over 100 years ago in Switzerland – was concerned customer data on its old AS/400-based territory management system (TMS) wasn’t accurate enough.
At the time the Auckland-based company was making system changes for Y2K compliance, it was also planning to migrate its main systems to SAP. It looked around for a replacement CRM system that was more flexible and user-friendly, so salespeople would take greater care to keep things current.
The Australian office scoped out the market offerings in early 1999 and decided on the locally developed Visual Elk from the Great Elk Company, which was in the process of evolving into StayinFront. The product stacked up so well it was quickly adopted and further customised by Roche in New Zealand and its other Roche affiliates in the region.
In 2000, after investigating data management in the company, Roche worldwide found there was excessive duplication of information – particularly where a sales representative might be speaking with a client at the same time as a member of the office-based marketing team. It stipulated the 300 or more personnel in its global business operations standardise on Siebel for CRM. However, branches in the Pacific region stuck to their guns, insisting Visual Elk was providing everything they needed.
Systems administrator Benjamin Lambourne says Visual Elk required some unique customisation to meet Roche New Zealand’s needs, but it adapted well. The software allowed sales people to call up multiple records and see a visual representation of clients, call activity, schedules and contracts.
New rollouts
The move to Visual Elk was designed to keep everyone better informed and improve communications so customer data could be downloaded anytime, from anywhere, and updated in the field. Initially, only one of the specialist teams used the system. But, this year, Visual Elk was rolled out to two other teams within the Roche New Zealand group. This involved configuring it to support the different business models and training and supporting users.
“Having StayinFront based in Ponsonby made a big difference. Initially there were some issues around training. But once we outsourced this to SRD, our move up a version from Visual Elk 8.1 last year was fairly painless. We’ll wait until 2004, however, before moving up to Version 9. It won’t make a lot of difference from a user point of view, but administration will be a lot simpler – particularly when making model changes and database synchronisation,” says Lambourne.
In the early stages it was clear there would be major advantages from running the new system. But customising and installing the software was only part of the challenge. Convincing the users the new approach would be more efficient wasn’t as easy as expected. Not only was there a significant learning curve to climb, the company didn’t have the in-house resources to ensure everyone got up to speed with the new way of doing things.
“The in-house team members were spending much of their time getting the system ready and rolling it out, so training wasn’t having the impact required. People fairly quickly forgot how to do things and, because we didn’t have a structured follow-up program, they weren’t really getting the revision they needed,” says Deborah Corby, the database manager who also has responsibility for Visual Elk.
One of the teams was given basic training and sent out in the field to use Visual Elk but the members quickly became frustrated and the adoption rate was low. “I’d always said we needed follow-up training because we had to get the whole company on it. Trying to do this in-house wasn’t as successful as we wanted,” says Corby.
Then Roche was approached by SRD (Strategic Resource Development) a training company that worked alongside StayinFront. “We had been wondering how to approach this issue, because we didn’t have the internal resources. So we bought in SRD to look at what we wanted out of the system, reintroduced the product and trained everyone. They also provided a follow- up to our mentoring sessions about every six weeks. This has resulted in much higher adoption.”
Corby says an added bonus was that the trainer employed had been in the pharmaceutical industry herself so the team could relate to her. “They know she’s been where they are.”
The opportunity for technology training also became a team-building exercise and a chance to give the team a sense of ownership of the new tool that would become such an important part of their daily role. They were asked what they wanted from the system and were given the opportunity to name the package at a brainstorming session.
Injecting humour
Now, each of the three sales teams even refers to it differently. One team calls it Bob (building our business, beating our budget), the specialist team affectionately refers to it as George (Growing and enriching opportunities with Roche and Great Elk) and the cardiovascular team calls it Babs (Better access business system).
“This has allowed them to personalise the use of Visual Elk and resulted in a much greater buy-in for using the software and greater enthusiasm when it came to training, as well as introducing a bit of humour,” says Corby.
Previously, the TMS version had become inaccurate and inconsistent. The salespeople had to update the database directly, remotely filling in every field. Now there’s greater confidence in the data provided; partly because the Visual Elk interface is much easier for salespeople to work with in the field. There is also less administration involved.
The fact Roche now imports current doctor, pharmacy, practice nurse and hospital contacts on a weekly basis from database marketing company Atlantis has also been a big step to ensure data is accurate.
Team members are encouraged to regularly update information from their Toshiba laptops and dial-in to synchronise with the database at least once a day. Some even enter data in their car after visits or during a coffee break. “They all work differently and we encourage them to file their reports during the day. The updates from the three teams in the field piggy-back on the e-mail process and with a single click they can synchronise all changes and updates from the host server,” says Lambourne.
The Roche mentoring sessions are another important way the company ensures field workers are on track and a way to tailor-make additional training. These are typically one-on-one sessions where team members go over issues with a trainer and discuss feedback from the sales force.
The training company also produces a monthly report on the data entered by the sales team to ensure it is thorough enough.
“Ongoing training is definitely the key to the success of the project. You really need dedicated training resources,” says Corby.
Additional training is given on an as-needed basis. Sometimes, this is shown up through the mentoring sessions, at other times it is required when there is a new product or an enhancement to the system. “Training has made life a lot easier,” Corby confirms. “We’ve had so much success with SRD, you can’t compare it with the way things were. It has freed up resources, including help desk people.”
Roche now has only one help desk person involved in answering user queries. If there is a difficult issue, Lambourne is called in. If it’s a specific database or Visual Elk problem, Deborah Corby steps forward. Mostly, they are able to get on with their daily tasks, using the system to manage territories and customer relationships.
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