Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a process or methodology used to learn more about customer needs and behavior so as to develop stronger relationships with them.

CRM in Technological Terms

There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in only technological terms would be a mistake. With the help of CRM and its processes, MOL – which has been using CRM since 2002 – can review its sales order and contract history. Sales orders and contracts are created and maintained in SAP R/3 system as well as being replicated in the CRM system on-line. This helps bringing together many pieces of information about customers, market trends, sales, marketing effectiveness and customer responsiveness. Thus CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to segment and gain insight into the behavior of customers and assess the value of those customers. In other words, organizations often seek to improve their sales and customer relationships using CRM software the better to manage these interactions. Using CRM, a business can provide better customer service, increase revenues, identify new customers, cross sell/up sell products more effectively, help sales staff close deals faster, make call centers more efficient and simplify marketing and sales processes.

CRM supports responding to HSE related customers’ requests as well. The number of such questions regarding our products has been significantly increasing since 2007 – partly due to the new chemicals legislation, REACH. The newly created workflow is supported by an HSE Knowledge Base, where we can store the received questions and the answers given to them, and other HSE-related information of our products.

CRM, as a software, is integrated in SAP R/3 (common master data). It has online and offline components and is mainly used by sales representatives. It has several very important functions, e.g.:

• Business Partner Management (prospects, customers, competitors, contact persons)
• Activity Management (complaint management, general information requests, customer visits)
• Product, Competitor Product Management
• Complaint Management
• Opportunity & Quotation Management (maintenance of pre-sales documents in CRM)
• Contract Management
• Pricing in CRM documents
• Customer Interaction Centre (customer orders, complaints or invoicing requests)
• Marketing Campaign Management (marketing planning, customer segmentation, campaigns, results measurement)
• BW (Business Warehouse) and local reporting

Commercial has managed to further improve customer relationship management via both process- and technical development of SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module. As a part of the continuous business reengineering process, we entirely integrated complaints handling, which enabled us to follow and evaluate lost-gained and potential customers, and automatic price information became also available. Improvements in standard reporting provided a solid basis to increase response time and get more detailed knowledge of customer needs. In connection with complaint handling, we introduced complaint handling concerning fuel cards in CRM. Besides deeper utilization of the system, authorization was extended, nowadays Commercial, Logistics-distribution, and even HSE organizations were able to gain reliable information fast. We also started to investigate customer value. Basic principles and methods have been defined and are being extended to all commercial subsidiaries to support measurable, comparable and actionable value and order of our customers is in progress.