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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Dissatisfied with a sales force automation-centric view of CRM, Dow Corning has invested in building a new collection of portal-based applications that pull data from and promote collaboration across the enterprise. |
 Since the mid-1990s, specialty chemicals manufacturer Dow Corning Corp., like many manufacturers, has been struggling to realize a return on its investment in customer relationship management (CRM) software. While the company's CRM deployment had been fairly effective at supporting sales force automation activities, such as contact management and lead tracking, its customer management requirements had grown well beyond that. With an increasingly global customer base, a complex and highly customized product to sell, and a multi-tier channel to support, Dow Corning needed CRM to be tightly integrated with other enterprise systems and to support a wide range of customer-support processes. "We started to question whether you can get any ROI out of CRM as strictly a sales force automation exercise," says Chip Reeves, director of marketing and sales processes at Dow Corning. So, just over a year ago, the company decided to reframe its CRM initiative, turning customer relationship management at Dow Corning from something that was narrowly sales force automation-focused and isolated into a set of processes that are more integrated with the rest of the enterprise and more broadly aimed at helping salespeople and sales management do things like prepare to call on customers, get access to pricing and product documentation, manage samples, and even brainstorm with customers and engineers on the company's next new products. [Click to continue] |