Furtenbach
Analyze, simplify, profit – Furtenbach shows the way
After an analysis, the Furtenbach company and its subsidiary GIBA had it in black and white: around half of the customers were served by both companies. But that was not all – each company used its own digital customer management system (Customer Relationship Management System, or CRM system for short). Simplify, was the motto. Two steps were successfully implemented.
Combine two systems into one
As a first step, a joint CRM system was introduced for both companies in 2023. The big advantage: it was immediately possible to see which customers overlapped in both companies. But not only that! The employees working for the customer suddenly saw all activities at the customer‘s site, regardless of whether the customer was contacted by GIBA or Furtenbach. It is obvious that this step not only simplified the processes, but also significantly improved communication with the customer.
“To sum up, one can only say that the simple idea has resulted in a clear win-win situation. The customer is always looked after by competent contact persons, both commercially and technically, and FURTENBACH and GIBA have saved on previous field staff costs!”
Günter Eder,
CEO Furtenbach und GIBA
Clear separation of duties in customer care
The next step was to evaluate the individual customer visits for the Austrian and Slovenian markets, with a particular focus on the people visited. The result was interesting: the technically oriented field service covered commercial topics as well as application technology. Although the commercial decision-makers such as purchasing, management, etc. were sometimes visited, the vast majority of visits were made to the technical department or to the production department directly at the machine. This led to two challenges at once: on the one hand, the decision-makers were not optimally looked after, and on the other hand, the sales representative only covered the technical side superficially. Since the application technology is relatively complex, he often had to consult a specialist. This was not only ineffective, but also expensive. Therefore, a new sales system was established in the fourth quarter of 2024. In the future, the commercial part, such as price negotiations, offer tracking, complaint processing, etc., will be handled exclusively by the back office (without customer contact), the sales management and, depending on the size, also by the management. For technical questions, the technical expert is consulted immediately.